Geographical Intimacy: exploring the

relationships

between poet, poetry and place.

Alyson Hallett

1

Contents Page

2

Abstract: ii

Statement of Aims and Objectives:

iv

Acknowledgements: vi

Thesis: Geographical Intimacy

1

Introduction: Searching for the Jellyfish

2

Chapter One: Geography, Intimacy, Proximity,

Distance 18

Chapter Two: The Body as Part of a Continuum

32

Chapter Three: Love the Source and Love the Transgressor

43

Chapter Four: Death and Impurity

55

Chapter Five: The Possibilities of Interfusion

66

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Conclusion: Choreographies of the Tongue

80

Portfolio 91

Introduction:

92

Future Geographies or la, la, la or The Singing that Joins Us to this Rock:

122

Appendices:

196

Bibliography:

201

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Abstract

This thesis explores the relationships between poet,

poetry and place by establishing an innovative conceptual

framework that is referred to as ‘geographical intimacy’.

This framework enables me to investigate the various

components of establishing an intimate relationship with

the land and avoids wherever possible the constrictive

rural/urban, nature/nurture dichotomies. ‘Geographical

intimacy’ proposes an inclusive approach to a multitude

of different environments and situates the human being as

an integral part of the nature of these environments.

Practice-based research has led to the identification of

four vital elements that are involved in the composition

of a relationship with the land. They are: evolution,

love, death and interfusion. In the critical section of

the thesis, each one of these elements is investigated

through poems, poetic process and the study of language.

In the portfolio, these themes inhabit the poems I have

written and present a body of work that is coherent and

diverse.

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The poets whose work I have chosen to illuminate the

critical research are Frances Molloy, Denise Levertov,

Jack Gilbert, Rumi, Rebecca Elson, Taliesin, Hélène

Cixous, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. These poets are

from different continents and cultures and this

comparative aspect of the thesis extends to include the

observations of anthropologists, physicists and

geologists. I have also included five new translations

of poems by the Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca in the

portfolio. In this way ‘geographical intimacy’ is

situated within a global cultural context that

acknowledges the influence of other disciplines, and

poetry written in languages other than English.

This thesis is a poetic adventure that foregrounds the

importance of creating interfused encounters with the

nature of our environments and ourselves. It is hoped

that this work makes a contribution to current debates in

the fields of poetry and ecology.

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Aims and Objectives

The primary aim of this PhD is to create a portfolio of

seventy new poems, including five translated poems, of

publishable quality, that have arisen from an immersive

practice of writing and research into geographical

intimacy. In addition to this the research element aims

to expand the boundaries of what ‘nature’, and

‘landscape’ might be, and to investigate the various ways

in which the poet relates to, and connects with, the

compositional elements of these things.

I aim to present a body of work whose scope reflects

the gamut of my experiences of geographical intimacy.

The portfolio includes poems that have emerged from

living in Hartland, North Devon, as well as travels to

various other places; real, imagined and remembered.

This multiplicity of viewpoints aims to create a

kaleidoscopic and global mapping of the bonds between

myself and the various landscapes that I live in, visit

and dream about.

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The research aims to strengthen and develop creative

practice at the same time as encouraging me to observe my

process and produce a critical thesis that responds to,

and nurtures, creative work. Bringing the creative and

academic work together engenders an illuminative approach

to the question of what it means to achieve geographical

intimacy by showing how connections with the land are

experienced through the corporeal body as well as the

body of poems that ensue from poetic practice. The

research further aims to explore the connections between

the inner life of the poet and what is perceived to be

outside, by investigating ideas of interfusion and the

possibilities that arise from this.

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The principal objective of this practice-based research

is to identify some of the key features of a connected

relationship with the environment. The poet explores

these features within the framework of geographical

intimacy and offers examples of how to transpose intimacy

from human-based relationships to land-based

relationships. The poems in the portfolio signal which

aspects of relationship need to be researched and, in

return, the research clarifies and expands upon the

subjectively intuited elements that have been sourced in

the creative writing.

A second objective is for the researcher to be able to

use the framework of geographical intimacy as a means of

exploring the complex and multi-layered nature of living

in relationship with an environment. This leads to a

recalibration of the relationship between people and the

land: the human being is no longer someone who is

separate from, and in control of, the natural world but

rather an integral, and connected, part of it.

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A third objective is for this research to produce

enough evidence to prompt a reconsideration of how we

relate to our environments by questioning culturally

entrenched dichotomies. The research should enable the

reader to apply the themes of geographical intimacy to

their own lives, and to approach poetry as a language of

experience that can take us beyond what we already know

into new, and more expansive territories.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the School of Communication,

Culture and Creative Arts at St. Mary’s University

College for the scholarship for my fees, and for an award

from the research fund to attend the Living Landscapes

conference at Aberystwyth University in 2009. Thanks are

due to Tess Nowell, Learning Advisor, CCCA, Annette

Welland, Quality Assurance Officer, and the staff of

Exeter University library and St. Mary’s University

College learning resources centre. Thanks to co-

supervisor Conor Carville for his warmth, encouragement

and insight and special thanks to my supervisor Robyn

Bolam for her support, inspiration and invaluable help.

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following

publications in which some of the poems in the portfolio,

or earlier versions of them, first appeared: Poetry Review,

Temenos Academy Review, abridged, Resurgence, Agenda, tall lighthouse,

Poetry Salzburg, Cornish World.

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Thanks to Jorge Esquinca for permission to include his

poems, and translations of them, in this collection.

Many thanks also to Mercedes Nùñez, with whom I translate

Jorge’s poems.

I am grateful to the organisers of the following poetry

festivals – many of the poems in the portfolio received

their first exposure at these events: Lydney Festival,

Bristol International Poetry Festival, Ways With Words

(Dartington), Appledore Literature Festival. Thanks also

to Mac Dunlop and the owners of Mr. B’s Emporium for

inviting me to read at their events.

Special thanks to Annie Lovejoy for inviting me to be

poet-in-residence for the Caravanserai project on the

Roseland Peninsula, Cornwall, where some of the poems in

the portfolio were written.

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Thanks to Sarah Blunt, producer, at the Natural History

Unit, B.B.C. Radio 4, Bristol for commissioning the

programme, Migrating Stones, and to Arts Council England for

funding the Migrating Stones project. Several of the

poems in the portfolio have arisen from these

opportunities.

Thanks to Julia Meiklejohn for inviting me to be poet-in-

residence at the Small School in Hartland. Thanks also

to Rosalyn Chissick and Natalia Jedlinski, and all my

friends and family who have helped me to keep going.

Thanks to the organisers of the Desire Lines conference

at Dartington Hall where I presented a paper on my work

with stones and poetry. Several of the poems in the

portfolio were read as a part of this presentation.

Finally, this thesis and portfolio would not have come

into being without the support and encouragement of

Samuel Walsh – my love and thanks to him.

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Introduction: Searching For The Jellyfish

Recognising the need for connection between people and the land and identifying the problematics of locating ‘nature’ outside the human being.

It is 2010 and barely a day passes without hearing news

of an environmental disaster or the extinction of yet

another species. In A Place in Space, North American poet,

Gary Snyder, identifies the following as some of our

current world-scale issues:

world deforestation and soil loss, rapid loss of biological diversity, water and air pollution, loss of local cultures, languages, skills and knowledges,loss of heart and soul. (Snyder, 1995, p.59)

In addition to this, we are now facing changes in the

temperature of the atmosphere that ‘affect every part of

our planet and every aspect of people’s lives’

(Blenkinsop et al., 2007, p.9). Is it possible that we

have become so disconnected from the land that we are

causing irreversible damage to the very systems necessary

for life upon the only planet known to be hospitable to

human beings?

The anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, endorses the

fact that we are facing a crisis when he writes:

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We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. (Bateson, 2000, p.467)

What could possibly inspire us to destroy ourselves? Is

Bateson suggesting that we are engaged in some huge,

collective act of suicide? If he is, then what lies at

the root of this self-destructive behaviour? The

following quotation by an Aboriginal Elder may offer some

indication:

All the people that are creating the destruction don’t have a feel for the land, for the environment.They’re not connected, there is no belief.

(McConchie, 2003,p.76)

In this thesis, I propose to take a step back from

the urgent imperatives of an impending environmental

crisis in order to examine more fully what it might mean

to have a ‘feel for the land’. I will be exploring the

idea and experience of ‘connection’ in a global context

by referring to the work of predominantly contemporary

poets who live and write in a range of different

countries and cultures1. All of these poets have crossed

borders or boundaries – most of them have spent long

1 This has necessitated the use of translated work and, wherever possible, I have quoted the original to accompany the translation.

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periods living in countries they were not born in, and

have thus been subject to a cross-pollination of ideas

and perspectives. In the following five chapters and

conclusion I will also construct an ideological

framework, which I call geographical intimacy, that

allows us to translate the requirements for intimacy

between human beings into the terrain of relationships

between human beings and their environment. This

critical and creative research explores the various

levels of connectivity between a poet and the landscapes

of her body, mind, soul, immediate surroundings, country,

world and universe. In essence, it applies a poetic lens

to the deceptively simple phrase ‘feel for the land’ and

then proceeds to bear witness to a multi-dimensional and

complex web of relationships2.

For as long as poetry has been written, poets have

been writing about their connection with the land. In

Lyric IV by Sappho (610-570 BC), she begins by summoning

the gods that inhabit the earth:

2 The words ‘j’ai vu et j’ai rendu témoignage’ (I have seen and I have borne witness) are written in a window in the Sacré Coeur cathedral in Paris. This phrase underpins and guides my practice as a poet.

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O Pan of the evergreen forestProtector of herds in the meadows (Sappho, 1906)3.

She then goes on to petition Aphrodite, asking her to

‘touch’ and ‘enkindle/This moon-white delicate body’

(ibid), so that in her mortality she might attain a

measure of beauty that is ‘Fleet yet eternal’. Sappho’s

lyric portrays a fluid and celebratory movement between

the forest and gods and goddesses, as well as showing an

intimate connection between the poet’s body and the

environment she inhabits. It is important to remember

that at the time when Sappho was creating poetry:

Greece was an oral culture and poetry was performed to an audience. Furthermore, it was not spoken but sung or recited to musical accompaniment.

(Balmer, 1984, p.15)

Later, the Idylls of Theocritus (c. 316-260 B.C.) gave

rise to a literary form that became known as pastoral

poetry. Although I do not intend to conduct a detailed

investigation into the history and development of the

pastoral, it is pertinent to briefly acknowledge its

influence upon poetry in the West.

3 Please note that there are no page numbers in this book.

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Theocritus was a Sicilian poet and his Idylls

portrayed a peaceful, rural world that was inhabited by

people who experienced emotional turmoil. This ‘bucolic’

vision was then developed into pastoral by:

a process which both narrowed its focus to certain elements of T.’s ‘bucolics’, notably love and the relations between man and nature and between presentand mythical past, and expanded the range of such song by giving primacy to the metaphor of the poet as herdsman. (Hunter, 1999, p.11)

Pastoral poems were written for an urban audience and

represented a retreat into a rural idyll, that is to say

a landscape that was wholly idealised and untainted. In

this sense it became ‘a linguistic borderland that

constructs the artifice of Arcadia’ (Gifford, 1999, p.

46) where innocent shepherds lived in a prelapsarian

world. This tendency to represent nature and the rural

landscape as something that was dreamed of, a perfect

place, rarely bore any relation to the actual physical

reality of that place. Pastoral poetry became a way of

retreating into a peaceful and idealised haven but as

Gifford notes, ‘Pastoral’s celebration of retreat is its

strength and its inherent weakness’ (Gifford, 2008, p47).

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The weakness inevitably created opportunities for

poets to subvert the pastoral vision by challenging

artifice and writing evocations of rurality that were

more real, less perfect. From the Renaissance onwards,

writers such as Marvell, Shakespeare and Pope all show a

clear shift in the balance between idealism and reality

in pastoral poetry. This shift develops further until,

for example, Burns exposes the way in which man’s need to

dominate has broken a fundamental union in ‘To A Mouse’:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominionHas broken Nature’s social union,An’ justifies that ill opinion

Which makes thee startleAt me, thy poor, earth-born companion

An’ fellow mortal! [1785] (Burns, 1991, p.111)

Wordsworth, too, draws upon the pastoral tradition in

poems that do not shy away from the hardships of rural

life. In ‘Michael’, the shepherd is compelled, because

of poverty, to send his only son away to the city. This

results in Luke, the son, giving:

himselfTo evil courses; ignominy and shameFell on him, so that he was driven at lastTo seek a hiding-place beyond the seas. [1800]

(Wordsworth, 1973, p.109)

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When Michael and his wife die, the tradition of sheep

herding dies, their house is razed to the ground and only

an oak tree and the unfinished sheep-fold remain by the

‘boisterous brook’ (ibid). The land, then, is resilient

but the relationship between humans and the land is

complex, economically influenced, and variable because it

brings grief as well as joy. In ‘Tintern Abbey’,

Wordsworth also shows evidence of retaining some degree

of idealisation by seeing:

In nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts [1798] (Wordsworth,

1973, p.165).

Whilst there is solace to be found in these ideas, this

thesis is also concerned with a more inclusive and impure4

understanding of nature and this impure aspect of

intimacy with the land is addressed in Chapter Four.

Here, then, we find some of the difficulties

involved in trying to see a landscape for what it is. We

move from framing an ideal, rural landscape for urban

readers to ‘anti-pastoral’ poems that counteract the

ideal, then on to what is referred to as post-pastoral

4 ‘Impure’, here, means acknowledging the reality of things as they are.

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where the poet achieves ‘a vision of an integrated

natural world that includes the human’ (Gifford, 2008,

p.148). However, the decision to include poems by

Octavio Paz in this thesis will challenge our

understanding of nature poetry and, I believe, move us

beyond the need to speak of ‘nature’ or even a ‘natural

world’.

Whilst it is not the task of this thesis to verify

scientifically the current environmental destruction, it

is important to acknowledge the current climate of

thought and its influence upon my thinking. In addition

to this, I concur with Alice Oswald, who states in the

introduction to the anthology, The Thunder Mutters, that she

is not concerned with ‘any one ecological message’

(Oswald, 2005, p.x). An alliance with one particular

‘message’ would compromise my ability as a poet to bear

witness to what is happening and, I believe, diminish my

work as a poet. For these reasons, I am not trying to

find solutions to problems but rather to re-imagine the

parameters of what our relationship with the land might

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be from a viewpoint that is engaged and indifferent,

passionate and dispassionate.

Fundamental to the pursuit of defining geographical

intimacy is the belief that a relationship with the land

of any landscape, like most other relationships with

living things, will be complex, layered and frustratingly

inconsistent. In order to conduct my research I have

been living and working in the remote, North Devon

village of Hartland for the past six years5. This is

consistent with the nature and scope of creative writing

research as it is set out in the National Association of

Writers in Education handbook that offers a ‘Creative

Writing Research Benchmark Statement’:

Creative Writing research is an investigative and exploratory process. Of the various approaches adopted, some may be called ‘situated’ or action research; some reflexive; some responsive; some may result from an engagement with ‘poetics’; some may adapt or adopt the investigative procedures of otherdisciplines, where useful. (NAWE, 2008)

My research is ‘situated’ on a peninsula of land that

juts into the Atlantic Ocean, but my investigations are

5 This move from the city to the country was not a pastoral retreat or a quest for any kind of idyll. It was an economically-motivated response to an invitation to take up the post of poet-in-residence inthe Small School.

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not exclusive to this particular environment and although

they are primarily concerned with creative writing, I

have also found it interesting and necessary to include

observations made by physicists, anthropologists and

geologists. This accords with the tendency in

ecocriticism to concentrate ‘on linkages between natural

and cultural processes’ (Kroeber, 1994, p.1), or, as

Kerridge argues in his introduction to Writing the

Environment:

The real, material ecological crisis, then, is also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation. (Kerridge, 1998, p.4)

It is important to state, however, that whilst

ecocriticism ‘seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms

of their […] usefulness as responses to environmental

crisis’ (Kerridge, 1998, p.5) I will be reading and

responding to the poems in this thesis as poems in their

own right rather than attempting to establish a

meritocratic system of evaluation. As a poet, I believe

that a poem’s primary task is to achieve the wholeness of

itself as a poem, irrespective of its political or social

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relevance. If it is also a useful response to

environmental crisis, then this is a bonus.

One of the problems encountered when talking about

the land is the way in which it is often perceived as

natural (irrespective of the human hands and machines

that may have shaped it) and thus ‘other-than-human’

(Snyder, 1990, p.9). That is to say, we identify nature

as something that exists in a hill or a fox or a tree,

but not in a human being because humans, for some reason,

are not considered to be a part of nature. However, if

we are to establish a feel for the land, then I suggest

that we need to be able to reposition ourselves in the

continuum of nature rather than outside it. An example

of nature being ‘other-than-human’ can be seen in the

following, taken from ‘An essay on ascending Glastonbury

Tor’ which was written by the cultural geographer John

Wylie. In this otherwise erudite piece of writing, Wylie

feels at liberty to describe his journey in the following

way, ‘ The path is level, hemmed in, nature at close to

hand’ (Wylie, 2002, p449). Nature, in this case, is to

be found in the hedgerows that hem the path but it is

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clear that Wylie has fallen into the convention of

regarding himself as distinct from this. Nature is in

the landscape and yet not in the human being.

I would like to offer a second example of how we use

nature to disconnect people from their environment. Six

years ago, when I was travelling through Wales on a very

hot day, I came across a sign pointing to a Nature

Reserve Lake. I followed the path and was keen to swim

but it was clear, from the notice board, that the lake

was reserved for birds, plants and insects and that human

beings were not included in this definition of Nature.

After a long debate with myself about categorisation,

potential damage and what my place might be in relation

to other natural things, I finally succumbed to the

seductive powers of the waters and swam. This later

found its way into a poem:

I strip naked, unsureif the lake is reserved for birds and beasts alone –

and then I do not care. TodayI am natural as any creatureforaging life from field or air. (Hallett, 2007,

p32)

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The disconnection between landscape and people is

deeply entrenched and because of this it can often appear

to be acceptable. When Scottish poet, Kathleen Jamie,

attended a conference on writers and the environment she

was met with an unabashed acceptance of this schism and

was dismayed to discover that the focus was almost

exclusively given to ‘primroses and dolphins’ (Jamie,

2008, p.37). It is heartening to read her response to

this where she identifies what she considers to be

missing, namely: ‘our own intimate, inner natural world,

the body’s weird shapes and forms’ (ibid). I will return

to the way in which Jamie includes the ‘inner natural

world’ in Chapter Four, but for the purposes of this

introduction it is imperative to foreground the

relationship between the inner world of the human and the

outer world of landscape because I do not believe it is

possible to establish a feel for the land if we have no

feeling for the landscapes of our own bodies and minds.

That the two have been divided is evident; investigating

how we might begin to re-connect them is the task of this

thesis.

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I am using the term, ‘geographical intimacy’, as an

alembic: a container into which I can place various

ideas, experiences and perceptions in order to distil a

clearer and more viscerally alive way of relating to the

world. In this sense I am attempting to reconnect the

inner world of a human being with what is perceived as

the external world of a landscape and to challenge a

myopic categorisation of ‘nature’. The relationship

between an individual and her environment is, of course,

amply explored in the field of psychogeography and it

might be argued that there is no need to invent a new

terminology, but psychogeography is exclusively concerned

with the ‘attempt to transform urban life’ (Coverley,

2006, p.10). Given that my studies are not limited to

that which is urban or city-based, I have had to devise a

concept of my own that goes beyond the rural/urban

schism. The term ‘geographical intimacy’ permits us to

inhabit landscapes that are not rigidly delineated, where

the divisions between one thing and another are porous

and in a process of constant communication, rather than

isolated and impermeable.

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Snyder, a fervent environmentalist as well as poet,

offers the greatest challenge to our understanding of

nature with the following:

Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural. By these lights there isnothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing – by definition – that we do or experience in life is “unnatural”. (Snyder, 1990, p.8)

The implicit suggestion here is that if we are unable to

split things into natural and unnatural, then we cease to

be able to distance ourselves from them and instead are

faced with the responsibility of understanding that

everything belongs to the same family, or web of being,

and thus cannot be disowned. But how are we to become

more familiar, more intimate with the nature of our inner

worlds? The psychotherapist, Wilhelm Reich, suggests it

will not be easy:

It took many million years to develop you from a jelly-fish to a terrestrian biped. Your biological aberration, in the form of rigidity, has lasted onlysix thousand years. It will take a hundred or five hundred or maybe five thousand years before you rediscover nature in you, before you find the jellyfish in yourself again. (Reich, 1975, p.35)

When Reich wrote this in 1945, he wanted “‘to win for the

researcher and thinker the right to personal reaction’

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and to show the man-in-the-street how he forges his own

chains by his unquestioning acceptance of prevailing

norms”6. Reich equates the rediscovery of one’s own

‘jelly-fish’, or personal nature, with enabling people to

question, rather than blindly accept, what they are told

to do7. Given that this book was written in the wake of

World War Two, Reich’s correlation of blind acceptance

with ignorance of one’s own nature is startling. Is it

possible that we are not fully alive when we are not

conversant, and intimate, with the landscape of our

‘natural, inner world’? If so, then how are we to

develop a feel for the land when our feelings are, in the

first instance, atrophied?

The poem, ‘Correspondances’, by Baudelaire, takes us

into the core of this problem:

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliersLaissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles

6 This quotation is taken from the back cover of Reich’s book, Listen, Little Man! (Reich, 1975)7 I once worked with a group of ‘talented and gifted’ students at theArnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol for two weeks. We wrote about, discussed and explored the current exhibitions of conceptual art. I encouraged the pupils to delve into themselves in order to find responses to the work on show. Towards the end of this period of work I was intrigued to learn that a parent had lodged a formal complaint against me. The parent said that her son was coming home and asking too many questions. This was deemed to be inappropriate and disruptive behaviour for a ‘gifted and talented’ teenager.

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Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. (Baudelaire, 1972, p.36)

(Nature is a temple, in which living pillars sometimes utter a babel of words; man traverses it through forests of symbols, that watch him with knowing eyes.) (trns. Scarfe, 1972, p.36).

A delicious confusion of symbols, a ‘babel’ of words, a

sense of being watched – what is this nature that

Baudelaire speaks of; where is this landscape, this

temple? In the world of the imagination, it is possible

to embody a geographical terrain that is replete with

chaos and order, dream and reality, passivity and

activity because everything is unleashed from its

quotidian restrictions and does not need to adhere to

logic. This unleashing leads to the final line where we

see, ‘l’expansion des choses infinies’; the expansion of

infinite things.

So far in this introduction I have shown that there

is a need to re-establish a connection with the land but

in order to be able to do this we need to achieve a

parallel connection with what Reich refers to as the

‘jelly-fish’ within, or the ‘inner natural world’ as

Jamie called it. In Chapters One and Two I will return

30

to this and explore it in more detail through the poetry

of Denise Levertov, Frances Molloy and Rebecca Elson,

with a particular emphasis upon how intimate contact with

an environment is fundamentally linked with an awareness

of self. Before doing this, however, I wish to consider

further what kind of approach is needed in order to be

able to facilitate this enquiry.

The Earth’s landscapes can be measured, mapped,

photographed, quantified. They are also mysterious,

evocative, deceptive, surprising. We are working with

paradoxical notions here and, as with all paradoxes, both

sides of the same thing need to exist in order for it to

achieve wholeness. Thus I suggest that to see what lies

without, the poet must also see what lies within: vision

balanced with blindness, reality balanced with dream.

When a porous seam exists between each of these two

things, a new way of seeing and connecting arises. It

is, perhaps, the poet’s task to enter this seam and find

a way of embracing a multitude of different, and often

contradictory, perspectives. Rebecca Elson, who is an

astronomer as well as a poet, tells us what can happen

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when only one way is pursued – in this instance reliance

upon gathering empirical data:

And I forget to ask questions,And only count things. (Elson, 2001, p.9)

In this poem, ‘We Astronomers’, Elson’s reliance

upon counting, as opposed to questioning the things she

does not understand, leads to a universe that has ‘moved

a long way off’. Registering the universe in a way that

relies too heavily upon the acquisition of fact only

achieves the opposite of what she was hoping to find.

The more she knows, the more the universe moves a long

way off. We need to connect with the unknown, she is

telling us, or else (paradoxically) we will not find what

we are looking for and we will forget our Responsibility to Awe

(this is the title of Elson’s book).

Asking questions reminds us that we are not only

finders and keepers of knowledge but also creatures who

are in the dark, who inhabit the unknown as much as the

known. ‘The Poet’, by George Mackay Brown (Brown, 1992,

p.24), tells of a poet who comes to a Fair and entertains

his companions. It is clear, however, that amusing and

pleasing others is not his ‘true task’:

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When all the dancers and masks had gone insideHis cold stareReturned to its true task, interrogation of silence.

(ibid)

The poet interrogates silence in order to discover what

it may or may not contain, for it is only in this way

that he can he make the inaudible, audible and the

invisible, visible. It is interesting to note the

emphasis here upon ‘interrogation’, which suggests an

energetic and somewhat combative relationship between the

poet and silence. This method of enquiry is also

proposed by Ted Hughes who suggests that a poet’s work

involves:

That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. (Hughes, 1969, p. 57/8)

For Hughes and Mackay Brown, the poet must become

immersed in the ‘pond’ of themselves or they will not be

a poet at all. It is in the inner landscape that we find

‘the world of final reality, the world of memory,

emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common

sense, and which goes on all the time, consciously or

33

unconsciously, like the heart beat’ (Hughes, 1969, p.57).

This inner landscape is also evident in things that are

not human, as Hopkins notes in his journal on May 9th

1871, ‘The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their

inscape’ [1871] (Hopkins, 1980, p.54). I suggest it is a

familiarity with inscapes that will give us a feel for

the land and a sense of belief that was referred to at

the opening of this introduction.

In Alice Oswald’s poem, ‘For Many Hours there’s been

an Old Couple Standing at that Window’, an old couple

refuse the opportunity of re-connecting with their inner-

lives and instead opt to remain safe and secure in what

they know:

But their eyesight slid down,it fell at their feet, theyshrank into sleep, their mouthsdried, their dreams rattled in their pods.

After all, they have only their accustomed answers. (Oswald, 2005,

p.24)

By relying upon their ‘accustomed answers’, the old

couple resign themselves to a life that barely deserves

the name of ‘life’. Their dreams are all dried up and

their eyesight has slid down to their feet. This is a

34

sad, lonely picture, one that shows what happens when we

cease to be in relationship with our own curiosity, which

the Chorus in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral laments as

‘living and partly living’ (Eliot, 1982, p.46). The

importance of being intimate with the unknown, and thus

the need to ask questions, cannot be underestimated.

Hélène Cixous, when talking about the work of Brazilian

writer, Clarice Lispector, refers to this idea as

‘knowing how to avoid getting closed in by knowledge’

(Cixous, 1991, p.161). She writes:

It is not a question of not having understood anything, but of not letting oneself get locked intocomprehension. (ibid)

As soon as we are locked into comprehension, we become

prisoners of our own understanding and forget or avoid

our responsibility to keep on interrogating and

investigating the unknown.

It is worth asking why any of us would choose to

live a life that is less than it can be and how, as

poets, we are to engage with our environment in a way

that does not repeat the ingrained idea of people being

separate from nature. In Issue 102 of Granta, The New

35

Nature Writing, the editor Jason Cowley identifies an

entrenched understanding of nature writing as ‘the

lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer’

(Cowley, 2008, p.10). He goes on to identify this

wanderer as someone who was usually male, lonely and

outcast, in search of communion with nature. In the same

issue of Granta, Lynda Peelle argues that the writer is

an ‘intrinsic element’ of the landscape that is being

written about. She goes on to cite the historically

embedded separation between observer and that which is

observed as a cause of environmental degradation, clearly

echoing the idea that the people who create destruction

have no feel for the land because they are disconnected

from it. She writes:

…it is the tradition of the false notion of separation that has caused us so many problems and led to so much environmental degradation. I believe that it is our great challenge in the twenty-first century to remake the connection. I think our lives depend on it. (Cowley, 2008, p.12)

The ‘false notion of separation’ is one that many

scientists have already had to grapple with. The

physicist David Bohm was particularly interested in this

problem because he continually found that:

36

…any describable event, object, entity, etc., is an abstraction from an unknown and undefinable totalityof flowing movement. (Bohm, 2000, p49)

The important word here is ‘totality’ because Bohm is

arguing that one thing cannot be prised apart from

another and any attempt to do so is an abstraction and,

ultimately, a falsification. Earlier evidence of this

way of seeing everything as part of a whole, a ‘flowing

movement’, can be found in The New Scientific Spirit by Gaston

Bachelard:

There are no simple phenomena; every phenomenon is afabric of relations. There is no such thing as a simple nature, a simple substance; a substance is a web of attributes. (Bachelard, 1984, p.47-8)

Again, Bachelard is indicating quite clearly that no one

thing can be said to exist in isolation. Rather, each

substance forms an integral part of a much larger web.

Nature, in this respect, is relationship.

If all things are connected, then why have we

removed human beings from the ‘web’; what has led us to

do such a thing? In 1925, John Dewey, a philosopher and

educationalist, wrote the following in Experience and

Nature:

37

the constancy and pervasiveness of the operative presence of the self as a determining factor in all situations is the chief reason why we give so littleheed to it; it is more intimate and omnipresent in experience than the air we breathe. (Dewey, 1925, p.246)

Dewey suggests that our inability to acknowledge the

‘operative presence of the self’8 comes about precisely

because it is so obvious and omnipresent. In other

words, we are so much a part of the web, so intimately

involved, that we cannot see it. Further to this,

Barbara Render, in her essay ‘Subverting the Western Gaze:

mapping alternative worlds’, locates the genesis of this problem

in our way of seeing things. She writes:

The ‘Western Gaze’ succinctly expresses a particular, historically constituted way of perceiving and experiencing the world. It is a gaze that skims the surface; surveys the land from an ego-centred viewpoint; and invokes an active viewer (the subject) and a passive land (object). This active viewer is equated with ‘culture’ and the landwith ‘nature’; and viewer/culture are gendered male,land/nature are gendered female. Finally, the Western Gaze is about control. (Render, 1999, p.31)

8 I suggest there are two understandings of ‘self’. The first relates to an individual’s sense of their inner-world and the second relates to an individual’s awareness of a consciousness that is not limited to any one person or thing. This understanding, taken from areading of the Upanishads, identifies the former self as ‘the vulnerable and often painful individual nature and separate body’ (Cross, 2009, p.61) and the latter self as ‘the Vastness, the all-pervasive Reality […] not conditioned, separated consciousness […] but consciousness in itself (Cross, 2009, p. 60).

38

Render’s assertion that the ‘Western Gaze’ is governed by

control is illuminating. As long as the viewer remains

in control, he is able to ‘skim’ the surface and keep

everything firmly in its allotted place. Wordsworth’s

‘Daffodils’ is a good example of the divisions that

Render is talking about. In this poem the poet looks

down upon the land; he is the ‘active viewer’ and the

land is ‘passive’, an object upon which to cast his eye.

The opposite is true, however, in Book One of

Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ where the hills come to life when

the poet is rowing upon the lake:

When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinctUpreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. [1850] (Wordsworth, 1973, p.499)

I suggest that we need to bring all of our attention

to the different aspects of relationship in order to

begin recalibrating the way we write about nature and the

way in which we conceive of our connections with the

environment: through a consideration of geographical

39

intimacy we will strengthen and gain a deeper insight

into the connections between the landscapes of our

bodies, minds and souls and the land upon which we live.

If we fail to question the dominant modes of perception

then we are destined to prolong and intensify the

degradation of nature. As Peelle has already commented,

‘our lives depend’ upon countering separation and

discovering how we can initiate ways of seeing that

situate and express human beings as an ‘intrinsic

element’ of, rather than separate from, an inhabited

landscape.

How, as poets, can we do this? The poet e.e.

cummings reveals a way forward when he encourages us,

like Elson, to step beyond the known universe and into

one that is unknown. He writes:

But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet’s calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you’ve got to come out of the measurable doing universe and into the immeasurable house of being. Iam quite aware that, wherever our socalled civilization has slithered, there’s every reward andno punishment for unbeing. (cummings, 1974, p.24)

40

It is the task of this thesis to begin mapping a path

through the language of poetry that will lead us away

from a false notion of separation and towards a more

expansive understanding of what nature can be when viewed

from within a framework of geographical intimacy.

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Chapter 1: Geography, Intimacy, Proximity, Distance

Moving towards an understanding of how we share that which is personal with the land and thus begin to conceive of a mutuality of relationship.

In this chapter I will consider how intimacy, as an

active and guiding principle, might be useful in helping

us to respond to the need for re-connection. I will

explore two radically different experiences of intimacy

with a landscape in the poetry of Frances Molloy and

Denise Levertov. This will enable me to begin

constructing an ideological framework that clearly

identifies key components of how a ‘feel’ (McConchie,

2003, p.76) for the land can be manifested. I will also

endeavour to create an understanding of intimacy not as a

fixed and static thing, or achievable state, but rather

as something that is continually in process and a part of

an evolving matrix or, to use Bachelard’s phrase, a web

of attributes.

Intimacy, as an adjective, relates to that which is

innermost, deep-seated and personal. As a transitive

verb, it can also mean to hint or to announce. I wish to

employ both meanings of the word in this thesis by

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proposing that a more personally rooted engagement with

landscape will hint at what can be gleaned from such an

engagement. In order to gain a fuller definition of

intimacy, I refer to the work of the psychologist, Karen

J. Prager. Although her research is concerned with

intimacy between human beings, this does not preclude its

relevance to the relationship between people and their

environment. Prager deems intimacy between humans to

consist of the following:

All conceptions of intimate interactions seem to center on the notion that intimate behaviour consists of sharing that which is personal.

(Prager, 1995, p.21)

She goes on to identify three crucial features of an

intimate relationship, namely:

(1) sustained affection (or love) between the partners, (2) mutual trust, and (3)

partner cohesiveness. (Prager, 1995, p.25)It was necessary to look for definitions of intimacy

between humans because I have been unable to find

science-based literature that refers to intimacy between

a human being and their landscape. This, in itself, is

illuminating: if intimacy, as a guiding principle, is

considered to be crucial in forming healthy relationships

43

between people then why has it not also been extended to

the relationships between people and their environments?

Is it possible to translate the key features of intimacy

between people to the relationship between a person and

their geographical location, and if so, will this

encourage us to have a feel for the land and experience

connection with it?

Love, trust and cohesiveness: these three elements

will be explored in Chapters Two, Three and Four of this

thesis. In this chapter I am going to concentrate upon

what Prager refers to as ‘sharing that which is personal’

by considering two poets whose work evidences this

process of personal sharing.

Before looking at the poems, I wish to define

‘geography’ so that we can proceed with a clear

understanding of how it is being employed in this text.

In the Introduction I acknowledged that psychogeography

was not an applicable term for the work I am doing

because of its sole concern with urban landscapes. In

addition to this, I wanted my research to be able to go

beyond the psychological and into the more nebulous

44

realms of love and the soul. Although I refer to the

‘environment’, I did not want this word to be

foregrounded because, as Morton suggests, ‘The

environment was born at exactly the moment when it became

a problem’ (Morton, 2007, p.141). The word ‘geography’

denotes the science of the surface of the earth and its

inhabitants; the features or the arrangement of a place

(Chambers Dictionary, 2006, p.623). The root of the word is

found in Greek with ge meaning earth and graphein to write

(ibid). Geography, then, is concerned with writing the

earth and with finding a language that can speak to us of

the earth. Geographical intimacy suggests that writing

about the earth arises from a two-way and personalised

relationship and that this relationship requires both

parties (the earth and the writer) to share that which is

innermost or within. In other words, a relationship

based upon trust and rooted in affection (or love)

enables an exchange to occur.

‘The Woman and the Hill’, by Dorothy Molloy, begins

with the poet riding a ‘man’s bike’ but it is only after

she has dismounted and begun walking upon the hill with

45

‘antediluvian feet’ that something unusual begins to

happen. At this point, the poet is pulled into the

fabric of her landscape:

For aeons I treadmill

in place till a ladder of roots pulls me intothe trees. I grow dark as the forest

slides over my face. (Molloy, 2004, p.21)

There is danger and desire in these words and the feeling

that this experience is longed for; after all, it has

taken ‘aeons’ of being in one place for a crack between

the worlds to appear. If we relate this back to Render’s

critique of the ‘Western Gaze’ (Render, 1999, p.31), then

we can identify two radical departures from the gaze that

gives rise to a loss of feeling and separation. Firstly,

Molloy hides the man’s bike she has been riding. This

signifies the shift from a man’s journey to a journey

that is being made by a woman who then experiences direct

contact between her feet and the land as she treadmills

in place. Secondly, the poet is not in control of what

happens and instead it is the ‘ladder of roots’ that

pulls her into the trees. This is significant because we

are being presented with a relationship where the power

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to act is located in the landscape rather than the human

being, thus confounding conventional ideas of active

human, passive landscape, subject and object. The woman,

however, is not merely passive because once she has been

pulled in, she grows dark, and this darkening allows us

to realise that we are not in the presence of a simple

passive/active dichotomy but in the company of something

far more confused and complex where power is not residing

in any one given place or person but is rather moving

around and being shared between those who are involved in

the encounter.

When Molloy enters the trees we might also say that,

at this point, she is metaphorically entering a more

expansive and imaginative ‘self’. This self is the one

that knows no bounds; it is beyond the narrow

conceptualisation of what a self can be and it embraces

possibilities that were previously beyond reach. A

summation of this idea can be found in the following

quotation from Bachelard:

Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are

47

elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man.

(Bachelard, 1994,p.184)

For the purposes of this study, it might be more apt at

this point to rephrase Bachelard’s final sentence: indeed,

immensity is the movement of motionless woman. Molloy’s poem

takes us beyond any previously known landscape. This

intimate encounter with a geographical terrain that

cannot be seen with the outward eye is illuminating and

yet it is not dependent upon the light for its vision.

Instead, the poet undergoes an experience of endarkenment

and this requires her to access the parts of herself that

are not to be found with logic or reason but with

feeling. Whilst I am not advocating a return to the Dark

Ages, I am suggesting that Molloy hints at the

possibility of Endarkenment being a twin for

Enlightenment. This latter movement was chiefly

concerned with being mature enough to follow one’s own

understanding under the guidance of the motto ‘Sapere

aude! [Dare to be wise!]’ (Kant, 2009, p.1). Keeping

Molloy’s poem in mind, it might be pertinent to create

48

the following motto for Endarkenment, Sentire aude! (Dare

to feel!) because from a place of feeling, a whole other

understanding and vision of the world begins to appear.

The poet’s experience of endarkenment enables her to

go on and ‘visit the sett / of the badger, the lair of

the fox;’ and it makes her privy to that which is usually

kept secret and hidden9. This, in turn, leads to a

removal of her skin. This is significant because our

skins contain us, they mark the boundary of self and

delineate each one of us as an individual entity: Molloy

writes, ‘I slough off my skin’ and she makes it sound

easy, as if our skins can be removed as quickly as taking

off a jumper. Imagine yourself skinless and then follow

Molloy as she begins to see through the eyes of a

goshawk, eyes that protrude from ‘peep-holes’ in the high

up bone of her head. This is vertiginous writing; we are

out of any known depth and instead taken into the body of

a bird, into the heights that are familiar to those with

9 To receive knowledge from the darkness goes against the common understanding of ‘light’ being the harbinger of information and revelation. In relation to this I quote the following: “Contraries are never far away: in the words of the Sphinx, ‘Ego genero lumen sed tenebrae meae naturae sunt’ I generate light but darkness is part of my nature.” (Hills, 2004, p74)

49

wings. Our blood, our body, commingles – there is

kinship and communality here. The poet’s being and the

earth’s being and the bird’s and animals’ beings come

together in an intimate encounter where distinctions are

blurred and edges have been erased.

In effect, the poet ceases to be human in this poem

and this is necessary for the subsequent experiences to

be able to take place. This process is usually referred

to as shape shifting and it is commonly employed by

shamans when they travel into the bodies of other

creatures. Keeping Prager’s definition of intimacy in

mind though, as a sharing of that which is personal, it

is important to ask if the poet has shared of herself in

this encounter. It is evident that she has gained access

into the bodies of other things – the hill, the trees,

the bird for example – but have they in turn gained

access to her? I do not believe that they have and this

diminishes the scope of intimacy in this instance. I

will return to this issue in Chapter Five, where I will

conduct an extended investigation into interfusion, but

for now it is important to consider what the badger or

50

the bird might discover if they were allowed to gain

entry into the body of a person? If we refer these

questions back to the core issue of this thesis, how to

forge a connection with and have a feel for the land,

then it becomes relevant to apply these expectations to

ourselves as well. Do we have a connection with and a

feel for our own natures? Also, if the earth is

currently being degraded because of our separation from

it, then is it also possible to imagine that there is an

equivalent and parallel degradation occurring in the

human being?

In 1996, Susan Sontag wrote a letter to Jorge Luis

Borges in which she apologises for having to tell him

that books are now an endangered species. She expands

upon this by saying:

By books, I also mean the conditions of reading thatmake possible literature and its soul effects. (Sontag, 2003, p.112)

Sontag goes on to talk about the ways in which technology

permits us to interact with texts and how this is being

framed as ‘something more “democratic”’ (ibid). She

then counters this idea with the following:

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Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness – and of the book. (ibid)

Sontag is a luminary and prophetic thinker: in this

passage she defies that apparent glory of an evolving,

technology-based democracy because she is aware of what

is being sacrificed in order for this to happen. The

book, as an object, is whole; it has a skin, it contains

itself. The stories, or the poems inside it enter into

the reader and the reader places herself inside the

contents of the book. Glück describes this process as

one of receptivity on the reader’s part, a willed self-

effacement that allows the book to ‘exert its character’

(Glück, 1994, p.89) which enhances and expands the

character of the reader. If this ceases to happen,

Sontag states that our souls10 will suffer and that our

ability to turn inwards, to know our inward geographies,

our sense of self, will die. This is an environmental

degradation of the human landscape and it comes about

because of an inability to access our own natures, or the

‘world of final reality’ as Hughes referred to it.

10 What is the soul? When the poet W. S. Merwin addresses the soul with the question, is anyone there, he receives the following answer:‘is your answer/the question itself/surviving the asking/without end?(Merwin, 2007, p.175).

52

Given that we are facing an environmental crisis,

and Cowley states that ‘Few would doubt that we are

living in a time of emergency’ (Cowley, 2008, p.9/10),

then it is important to also consider the crisis of the

inward and personal environment. If, as I am arguing in

this thesis, the two are inseparable then we cannot be

facing a crisis in the natural and external world of

landscape without also facing one in the natural and

internal world of the human being. This, I believe, is

what Sontag is alluding to when she mentions ‘soul

effects’ and ‘the death of inwardness’.

When we consider the inward, imaginary place as a

landscape then we also encounter the problematics of

voyaging into somewhere that has no boundaries or

geographical location in the traditional and empirical

sense. There are no national parks of inwardness and

there are no nature reserves of the soul. We cannot

appoint wardens to patrol and protect these terrains

because they do not manifest materially in the physical

world. These inner geographies are precisely what we

find in books, and novelists and poets are the explorers

53

who venture forth into them and then invite us to

accompany them on their journeys. Access to this inner-

life requires solitude and what is commonly referred to

as soul searching. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a

letter in 1903:

The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude,great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one – this one must be able to attain.

(Rilke, 1993, pp.45/6)

As the earth goes into itself in winter, so the poet goes

into herself in solitude. This capacity for

introspection is essential if we wish to explore the

possibility of relationships that involve a mutual

exchange of that which is personal. To quote Rilke

again:

You are the deep innerness of all things,the last word that can never be spoken. (Barrows &

Macy, 1997, p.119)

The importance of solitude is also explored by the

contemporary writer and journalist, Sara Maitland.

Following the dissolution of her marriage, she chooses to

live alone and to dedicate the majority of her day to

silence. Whilst this is not the only recipe for

54

reconnecting with the inner world, she does give us an

example of what happens when an individual commits to

solitude. Not only does she find that she is becoming

increasingly sensitised to her own nature as a human

being, but she also becomes increasingly more responsive

to her environment. She writes:

On one unusually radiant day, I took a walk up the burn above the house and into a steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – mountains, on both sides, and below, tiny stands of water whichlooked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches. And there, quite suddenly, I slipped a gear. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. It was very brief, butI cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child. (Maitland, 2008, p.50)

In order to gain an understanding of intimacy that

is very different to the one presented in the poem by

Frances Molloy, I now wish to consider ‘Open Secret’ by

Denise Levertov. This poem is about Levertov’s

relationship with Mount Rainier, the mountain that she

could see from the window of her house near Lake

Washington, Seattle, and it introduces us to an

understanding of intimacy that is achieved through

55

keeping one’s distance from the land rather than being

very close to, or commingled, with it. It also shows how

the inner nature of a poet and the inner nature of a

landscape can coalesce and lead to the creation of

something else, a new topography where the poet has

transcended the dichotomy of an active viewer and passive

landscape by seeing through an imaginative and soulful

lens.

‘Open secret’ begins with the poet contemplating the

way in which she will come to know the mountain:

Perhaps one day I shall let myselfapproach the mountain – (Levertov, 1993, p.122).

‘Perhaps’ signifies that we are on unstable ground here;

it tells us that nothing is definite, nothing is certain.

This instability continues when Levertov speaks of both

‘I’ and ‘myself’ because this has the effect of

introducing us to someone who is not quite whole, at

least, they are more than one, they are doubled11.

11 In Margaret Atwood’s book, Negotiating With The Dead, there is an excellent chapter on the doubleness of the writer where she poses thequestion, “What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of the ‘writer’?” She goes on to say: “By two, Imean the person who exists when no writing is going forward – the onewho walks the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth – and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual

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Levertov could have written ‘I shall approach the

mountain’, but she chose to destabilise the authorial

voice and establish instead a voice that is moving and

thus impossible to pin down. This idea of a doubled self

will be reflected at the end of the poem, but it is

important to notice how she establishes this tenor of

sound and tension here, right at the beginning.

Levertov continues the poem by picturing what she

might expect to find on the mountain if she approaches it

in the traditional way (i.e. by walking upon it); namely

streams, meadow and snow. This method of approach would

allow her to catalogue and name the things that add up to

what is known as a mountain. However, she decides not to

do this because she has ‘no longing to do so’. She

writes:

This one is not, I think, to be known by close scrutiny […]

not by any familiarity of behavior, any acquaintance with its geology or the scarring roadshumans have carved in its flanks. (ibid)

The refusal to scrutinise the mountain is reminiscent of

Elson’s realisation (in the poem ‘We Astronomers’, in the

writing.” (Atwood, 2003, p.30)

57

Introduction) that looking too closely can result in the

inability to see what you are actually looking at.

Levertov’s refusal of familiar behaviour distances her

from empirical information and from those things that

human beings have ascertained or scarred the mountain

with. In her final interview, Levertov said the

following about climbing Mount Rainier:

I’ve taken a vow not to desecrate it by going up there. People should stop trampling all over it, leaving their garbage behind, and necessitating the placing of comfort stations around so-called wilderness. They should let wilderness revert to being wilderness. (O’Connell, 1997, p.3)

What she chooses instead is the unfamiliar, the

unknown, a relationship that will depend upon what she

feels rather than what she can count as fact. Once again

the comfort of an unassailable, or controlling ‘I’ is

circumvented when she writes ‘This one is not, I think,

to be known’. Neither the poet nor the reader is allowed

to slip into the assertive space that might be afforded

by a poet who writes without doubt. What is thought and

what is known, act in a contrapuntal fashion, the one

sounding its oppositional note to the other. Melodically

this complexifies the phrase and the paused ‘I think’

58

echoes the relationship between the ‘I’ and ‘myself’

established in the first line. There is surely a

reminder here of Keats’ idea of negative capability,

‘that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,

mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after

fact and reason’ [1817] (Keats, 2002, p.59). Levertov

not only opts to remain in her uncertainties but she also

establishes a relationship with the mountain by staying

away from it. Here, then, we are given an example of

intimacy that requires restraint and distance for its

existence, but is it possible for Levertov to share

anything personal with the mountain by doing this?

In the final lines, Levertov turns to the inward

eye, the imagination, and experiences an intimation of

the mountain’s power. This power lies in the:

open secret of its remoteapparition, silvery low-reliefcoming and going moonlike at the horizon, (ibid).

The solidity of the mountain dissolves. It is now a

‘remote apparition’ and it is alive. Like the moon it is

‘coming and going’, no longer fixed in place but

transient, mobile, changeable. This gives us the first

59

inkling of how the mountain and the poet may be

connected, for they are both rooted and unfixed, two

things in one, a paradox. The coming and going echoes

the instability of the poet who used the phrase ‘I shall

let myself’ at the beginning of the poem. Further to

this, Levertov ends the poem with a quietly epiphanic

awareness of the mountain’s nature which is ‘always

loftier, lonelier, than I ever remember’ (ibid). Surely

this is Levertov talking about herself as well? The

poet, in her solitude, sometimes forgets her loneliness,

and the journey she makes into language, into seeing with

the eye of imagination, often raises her above the

minutiae of life in order to be able to see it better.

For me, this exchange is akin to a lover’s confession, a

naked admission of the transitory and evolving nature of

the relationship between poet and mountain, poet and

language, materiality and immateriality. With regard to

geographical intimacy, ‘Open Secret’ can be said to give

us an example of poetry that:

does not deny a beyond but allows it its proper distance. The respect it demands for its own substance it extends to other substances. Following the grain of languages, poetry draws attention to

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itself and in so doing foils the casual appreciationof prose. (Clark, 1992, p.39)

Structurally, Levertov’s poems often draw attention

to the grain of the language and this can also be seen in

the poem ‘Aware’. This poem staggers across the page in

a three stanzaed architecture that is reminiscent of

steps being taken. To read it is to stutter, to proceed

with caution and in a slightly awkward manner. In the

poem the poet discovers vine leaves speaking amongst

themselves when she opens a door. Her presence makes

them be quiet and so she decides to be more surreptitious

in the future:

Next timeI’ll move like cautious sunlight, openThe door by fractions, eavesdropPeacefully. (Levertov, 1999, p.62)

Levertov once more presents us with an intimacy that can

be gained through maintaining a cautious and subtle

distance and emphasises the importance of listening to a

world that is alive, whose words will only be heard if

she proceeds peacefully.

In this chapter I have shown that intimacy, in a

geographical sense, can be attained through immersion, as

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evidenced in Molloy’s poem and that it can also be

attained by refraining from close physical contact, as

shown in Levertov’s poem. Both poems express a

dissolution of the controlling eye, or ‘I’, and resituate

agency in that which is being looked at: the mountain

attains mobility in ‘Open Secret’ and the ladder of roots

in Molloy’s poem ‘pulls’ the poet into the earth. The

ecological philosopher, Freya Mathews, suggests that this

kind of relationship can best be categorised as an

encounter. She writes:

Where knowledge in the traditional sense then seeks to explain, encounter seeks to engage. Knowledge seeks to break open the mystery of another’s nature;encounter leaves that mystery intact. When I believeI have revealed the inner mysteries of another in the traditional way, my sense of its otherness in fact dissolves, and any possibility of true encounter evaporates.

(Mathews, 2003, p.78)

Both Levertov and Molloy avoid the ‘traditional’ way of

relating to a landscape and their work returns to us new

possibilities and new ways of respectfully developing

connections with the land.

In this chapter I have also identified potential

limitations: firstly with Elson, who acknowledges that

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forgetting to ask questions has resulted in the universe

moving further away from, rather than closer to, her

enquiring self. Secondly, Molloy’s poem takes the poet

into the earth but this immersion relies upon the poet

sloughing off her skin and distancing herself from her

human nature in order to gain experience of the animal

kingdom. Thirdly, although Levertov’s ‘Open Secret’

offers us a glimpse of communion between the poet’s

nature and the mountain’s nature, the poem ends at

precisely the point where this could be more fully

explored. Levertov takes us to the threshold, but no

further. Is it possible to travel deeper into intimacy

with the land and, if so, how?

In Chapter Two, I will consider this question and

explore geographical intimacy in the light of Prager’s

notion of ‘partner cohesiveness’ by exploring the

qualities of partnership and cohesion in a poet’s

relationship with evolution and the way in which she

reads the landscape of her own body. This will further

the understanding of how the inner, natural world of the

human being and the external, natural world of a

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landscape are intimately linked and potentially in

communication with one another. Whilst this might not be

scientifically verifiable, it is poetically viable and

emphasises the importance of poetic language in being

able to conceive of a new ideological framework for

creating a connection with the land. The physicist,

Fritjof Capra, wrote in his seminal book, The Turning Point:

It is now becoming apparent that over emphasis on the scientific method and on rational, analytic thinking has led to attitudes that are profoundly antiecological. In truth, the understanding of ecosystems is hindered by the very nature of the rational mind. Rational thinking is linear, whereas ecological awareness arises from an intuition of nonlinear systems.

(Capra, 1986, p.24/5)

In addition to this, I will examine my methodology in

relation to the composition of this thesis and continue

to expand upon the idea of geographical intimacy by

considering the relationship between the human body and

evolution. This will lead to an understanding of how our

bodies can be listened to and understood as part of a

process that is situated within a historical continuum.

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Chapter 2: The Body as Part of a Continuum

Listening to the past and creating a personal and cohesive relationship with evolution.

If I take the land to be my partner, then at some point

in our relationship we will share with each other our

stories of evolution. Being a fairly new visitor to the

Earth, I will probably need to develop an ability to

listen to the much longer story that the land will be

able to tell me. If I were a scientist, I would call

this listening, geology or geography. As a poet, this

listening is something that arises when we experience the

complex layering of ‘place’, and how we have come to

occupy it. The poet Jeremy Hooker suggests that a place

is not just a co-ordinate on a map, something that exists

in the here and now, but a gateway that can lead to what

is, in effect, a space beyond that which is visible. In

his essay, ‘Putting the Poem in Place’, he writes:

Place connects us to the past, it is a ‘deep channel’ which bears the marks of other lives, the lives that made it, but where we stand it opens now,and to the future – the new, the place for our creative work. (Hooker, 2007, p.17)

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In this chapter I will consider not only the way in which

place connects us with the past, but also the way in

which the human body connects us with the past. In this

sense the body itself can be viewed as a ‘place’, that is

to say a location with its own evolutionary landscape and

its own ‘deep channel’.

Before looking at the work of the poet Rebecca Elson

in relation to this notion of a ‘deep channel’, I would

like to draw attention to language in relation to

geographical intimacy and also to the methodology I am

employing in the creation of this text. In The Order of

Things, Michel Foucault writes the following:

Language partakes in the world-wide dissemination ofsimilitudes and signatures. It must, therefore, be studied itself asa thing in nature.

(Foucault, 2007, p.39)

He goes on to say:

It is a secret that carries within itself, though near the surface, the decipherable signs of what it is trying to say. It is at the same time a buried revelation that is gradually being restored to ever greater clarity. (Foucault, 2007, p.39-40)

Foucault is referring to language in the sixteenth

century, but this does not preclude the relevance of what

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he says to a contemporary understanding of language. I

like the idea of words themselves being in process, of

their existence being about a journey rather than

something that is fixed, like a butterfly with a pin

through its thorax. To see a word as a secret that

carries signs of what it tries to say is beguiling, and

recognises the nature of language as something that is

not wholly concerned with rational, or logical,

composition. Jorge Luis Borges affirms this

conceptualisation of language in This Craft of Verse when he

considers a statement by Chesterton concerning the

origins of language:

Language is not, as we are led to suppose by the dictionary, the invention of academicians or philologists. Rather it has been evolved through time, through a long time, by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders. It did not come from the libraries; it came from the fields, from the sea, from the rivers, from night, from the dawn.Thus, we have in language the fact (and this seems obvious to me) that words began, in a sense, as magic. (Borges, 2000, p.81)

When I write a poem I certainly feel as if something

magical is happening. For the most part I do not know in

advance where the words are coming from or how they will

order themselves upon the page. I could say that I hear

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the words and that my hand writes them down, but there is

no a-priori consideration or calculation on my part.

Hopkins referred to this as the language of inspiration,

a mental acuteness that is either energetic or receptive,

an action of the brain when words can ‘strike into it

unasked’ [1864] (Hopkins, 1987, p.154). Denise Levertov

describes the work of writing poetry in the following

way:

the poet only sees in the process of language. The vision is given in the work process. (Brooker, 1998, p.71)

In this sense, language is my way of seeing, the words

are my eyes, the rhythm and the texture of language are

my body. The body of the poem temporarily takes

precedence over my own physical body and the written word

becomes my voice. I am translated from flesh to word

and, when the poem is over, returned to flesh; only then

am I able to see what I have written. This process is

also witnessed by Leslie Marmon Silko:

I work by intuition and instinct: I don’t make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan, it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen. (Silko, 1996, p.135)

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Whilst the process of editing creative work requires

close critical examination, the initial surge of

creativity that gives birth to a poem is not concerned

with any questions of critical validity. Perhaps this is

what Borges was referring to when he wrote:

When I am writing something, I try not to understandit. I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer. (Borges, 2000, p.118)

Tackling a thesis, however, requires me to also draw upon

very different abilities, namely the skills required to

order, plan and structure a coherent and logically

progressed argument. There is still a need for creative

surges and thinking that emerges through the act of

writing, but the balance is different. If my creative

work arises within and then makes its way into the

outside world, then my critical work can, for the most

part, be said to travel in the opposite direction. In

the book, Small Acts of Repair, by the performance group, Goat

Island, the director Lin Hixon acknowledges the

nourishing contribution of research to creative practice

when she writes of research:

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as an agent from the outside that transforms the material within, that brings nutrients to the digestion of our personal, individual experiences.

(Bottoms & Goulish, 2007, p. 215)

In order to be true to my creative and critical

abilities and to achieve a balance between them, I have

observed myself trying to write a text that accommodates

both inclinations. Sometimes, I have plotted a

sequential path and then rebelled against it. At other

times, I have restrained my desire to gallop along a

fascinating (but irrelevant) tangent. The process is

fruitful and infuriating and just as Levertov oscillated

between different selves in her poem, ‘Open Secret’,

there is no doubt that I, too, am moving between

different selves in the formulation of this work. In

bringing a measure of transparency to this aspect of my

writing method, I hope to work within a critical practice

that:

insists on finding the plurality, however ‘parsimonious’, of the text and refuses the pseudo-dominance constructed as the ‘obvious’ position of its intelligibility. (Belsey, 1980, p.129)

This thesis, then, is an admixture of academic and

creative process whose primary method of sourcing

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material has been through practical and creative

research. In terms of a method of composition, there

have been interesting clashes and collaborations between

my creative and prosaic self. This could also be viewed

in terms of how my conscious and subconscious minds

relate to one another. Scientifically, the pairing of

conscious and subconscious is viewed as being key to

creativity:

subconscious/implicit thought processes and conscious/explicit ones are more like equal partnersthan competitors […] Importantly, the subconscious isn’t the dumb cousin of the conscious, but rather acousin with different skills.

(Douglas, 2007, p.45)

and later:

So here, it seems, is experimental evidence for something we all instinctively know: that subconscious thinking is the source of all our inspiration – it is central to creativity. (Douglas,2007, p.46)

I see my principal method of composition as a commingling

of conscious and subconscious thought processes. I have

observed myself moving between what I feel and what I

think, between a poetic voice and an academic voice,

between writing poems and reading critical texts, between

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dream and reality. Pictorially, this process can best

be imagined as a caduceus, a staff that entwines the two

serpents of knowledge and creativity. Hermes, the ‘Greek

god of magic, letters, medicine’ (Walker, 1983, p395)

carried a caduceus and was considered to be the bringer

of knowledge and healing. By invoking Hermes and his

staff, I hope to bring elements of awareness and healing

to the materiality of this text and the ideas within it,

and to continue the tradition of poets who undertake

journeys into the dream realm in order:

to return, not with social solutions, but with strange stories that mysteriously have the power to heal. (Gifford, 2008, p.94)

The following, written by Lin Hixon, eloquently

elicits the possibilities of working in a way that

accommodates more than one approach without seeing them

as contradictory or opposed to one another:

Each one seemed to be reaching for a gesture outsideof themselves while performing the gesture with themselves – a process of self-quoting and citation from another source, simultaneously. I liked the idea that we would never get these movements right; that we were staging a failure. With the inability to succeed, we were given a stuttering. We were given fragility. We were given unstable possibilities. (Bottoms & Goulish, 2007, p.156)

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It has often seemed to me that I might never get this

thesis right, that I was ‘stuttering’ from one re-write

to another, and although I have now created what I

consider to be a wholesome text, I wanted to be honest

about the process, the fragility of it, the endless

possibilities and instabilities that have contributed to

its construction. This has been reminiscent of looking

at a cross-section of land and realising the way in which

the fabric of the Earth upon which we live, has been

made. Things break down, come together, die, fossilise,

transform, re-configure and solid ground is not always

quite as solid as we think:

You think the rocks are certain?Look at them, they’re full of faults.

You think that tree’s got it all mapped out? Please.

It’s bending under the weightof the wind and twisting back on itself

to find the light.

Why do you think the sea practices so much?Wave after wave after wave – (Hallett,

portfolio, p.175)

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Any ‘place’ or text evolves and, if it is alive,

continues to evolve12. My poems, my thesis, the land – we

are all evolving and changing and striving to be the full

measure of who or what we are and will be.

I now wish to consider the poem, ‘Devonian Days’, by

Rebecca Elson. Elson was an astronomer whose primary

field of research was dark matter, a hidden mass that can

be inferred only from its influence on observable

objects. At present, dark matter is something that has

not been found in any scientific experiment, but

scientists know that it must be there because of the way

it affects other things.13 This, I believe, is akin to

the imagination and heightens Elson’s ability in the poem

to not only perceive, but also experience, an invisible

presence.

12 I should perhaps ask, is a poem ever finished? Sometimes, I have changed published poems just minutes before I give a public reading of them. As long as I am alive, my poems will probably never reside in a state of fixed completion. As the Armenian-born painter ArshileGorky commented when he was asked how long it took to finish a painting: ‘When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness, I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while’. (This comment was part of an exhibition of Gorky’s work at Tate Modern, London, February 2010.)13 The astro-physicist, Vera Rubin, explains the quest for dark matterin the following way: ‘Our task is not only to collect as much light as possible – from ground- and space-based telescopes – but also to use what we can see in the heavens to understand better what we cannot see and yet know must be there.’ (Danielson, 2000, p.499)

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The poem begins with the following lines:

That was the week it rainedAs if the world thought it could begin again.

(Elson, 2001, p.29)

As a poet living in Devon, I immediately relate to the

volume of rain that Elson refers to. Indeed, there are

times when it appears to be perfectly sensible to

consider building an ark rather than raising the feeble

shelter of an umbrella. Elson immediately takes us into

a place where the world thinks, a faculty usually

associated with people rather than with planets. It

feels entirely natural though, and this is partly because

of the end rhyme of ‘rained’ and ‘again’ which gives a

feeling of assurance, of everything being as it should

be. In just two lines Elson deftly catapults the reader

into the heart of an unusual idea, namely one where the

volume of rain not only intimates a flood but at the same

time ignites the world’s ability to imagine it can ‘begin

again’.

The poem continues with people standing at a window

watching the rain. These observers connect the heaviness

they feel in their bodies with dissatisfaction with the

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weather because they are ‘aloof’ from their ‘amphibious

desires’. This is, perhaps, what we would expect, after

all it is easy to understand the dismal sensation of

being grounded by inclement weather. Elson, however,

realises that this is a habitual story and one that veils

the truth of what is really happening. The poem

continues by revealing what is hidden in the feeling of

dissatisfaction, and what they have lost by being aloof

from amphibious desires, namely:

the memoryAfter buoyancy, of weight,Of belly scraping over beach. (ibid)

Can Elson really be suggesting that inside our bodies

there is a latent memory that tells us what it was like

to crawl out of water and onto land for the first time?

That buried within our mistaken feelings about the

weather are histories so old they might stun us with

their knowledge? It is perhaps no coincidence that a

poet who is habituated to searching the outermost regions

of the universe for dark matter, something that cannot be

seen but which must be there, is able to turn her gaze

inwards and espy the oldest, amphibious memories inside

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the human body. Elson enters the ‘deep channel’ that

Jeremy Hooker spoke of, and this channel is not only in

the world but also in the human body. In this way Elson

broadens our understanding of place by connecting the

view of the world with a ‘view’ of the feelings, and

subsequent memories, that are aroused within the body.

I have wondered if it might be more accurate to talk

of ‘space’ rather than ‘place’ in this instance because,

by linking the body with a view from the window, Elson

effectively dislodges the existence of any one particular

location. Instead, we are transported into a memory

sphere that is outside of the here and now, and beyond

the reach of anything that can be mapped or measured.

This ability to warp time, or travel back through time,

is summed up by Rilke thus:

We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it. (Rilke, 1947, p.373-4)

It is significant that time becomes a malleable thing in

this poem. In terms of intimacy, time is like an

invisible presence that dances between the relating

partners and in this poem time itself expands within the

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human body and allows Elson to actually feel, and achieve

cohesion with, her evolutionary past. The need for

‘partner cohesion’ was identified by the psychologist,

Prager, as one of the key elements needed for intimacy

and I suggest that Elson’s poem endorses this. Hélène

Cixous further elucidates the connection between writing,

the body and the past:

There, where you write, everything grows, your body unfurls, your skin recounts its hitherto silent legends. (Cixous, 1991, p.42)

Elson’s body unfurls into the story of its own history

and the silent legend of evolution becomes something

personal14, something that is not only remembered but also

recorded in a poem. Words transmit and contain the

experience as the body of the poet and the body of

language simultaneously unfurl and recount.

In his essay, ‘Putting the Poem in Place’, Hooker

reflects upon the kind of territory that enables a poet

to see and go beyond the usual parameters of

14 Elson’s father was a geologist and this no doubt also gave her an additional insight into the nature of time and the connection betweenstars, people, and all the things of the Earth: ‘The Earth and all its elements are stardust, produced in a cosmic process that began between 10,000 and 20,000 million years ago…Surprisingly, human beings are made up of very few of the simplest elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, with some others present in tiny amounts’ (Busby III et al., 1996, p.60-61).

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understanding and vision. He says, ‘in recent years I

have found myself thinking more and more about liminality

– the condition of occupying a threshold’ (Hooker, 2007,

p.15). He expands upon this by saying that the

threshold:

may be seen as a boundary between worlds, a frontierbetween the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen, surface and depth, language and silence.

(ibid)

This threshold is where Elson positions herself when she

moves from a feeling of heaviness to the expansive and

revelatory memory of a reptile crawling out of the sea

and experiencing weight instead of buoyancy. The liminal

space gives her access to that which is otherwise unseen,

to feel this in her body and then return this silent

knowledge to the forum of language in a poem.

The poem ends with the following quatrain:

We didn’t notice, in our restlessness,The webbed toes twitching in our socks,The itch of evolution,Or its possibilities. (ibid)

Elson’s technique of revealing what was happening,

‘webbed toes twitching in our socks’, by saying that it

wasn’t noticed, is paradoxical because it allows us both

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ignorance and knowledge at the same time. I find this

generous, kind – a way of communicating that is wholly

inclusive because it allows us to be human and unaware at

the same time as being allowed to glimpse a much bigger

picture. Elson takes us from the familiar to the

unfamiliar by identifying the communality of ignorance

(i.e. what we don’t recognise) before revealing insight.

This technique is reminiscent of Levertov’s ‘I might

allow myself’ in ‘Open Secret’ because, once again, we

are in the company of a poet who is able to occupy two

places and be two people at once. In ‘Devonian Days’

Elson is locked into a place and time where she

experiences heaviness and restlessness but by crossing

the threshold, or entering a liminal space, she is able

to transcend limitation and achieve intimacy with the

weather, the reptile, the land and her own body.

Elson’s poem reminds us that the process of

evolution is not something that happened once, long ago,

but something that is still happening. It is memory

experienced in and through the body, in this instance,

that moves the poet beyond the confines of an individual

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existence and connects her with something much larger.

The poet and scholar, Kathleen Raine, refers to Plato’s

‘cosmic memory’ as a way of understanding this:

Plato taught that all knowledge comes from memory – recollection; but not memory of our own experience of a few years of mortal life. Plato’s memory is a cosmic memory, not memory as the behaviourists woulddefine it, something gathered from the experience ofthe senses, but instead a memory of the universal mind from which we are, from the confined nature of perception, shut off. (Raine, 1982, p.33)

‘Devonian Days’ moves from the confined nature of

perception and then catapults inwards, and paradoxically

outwards, into a memory sphere that exists in what Raine

refers to as ‘the universal mind’ and others call

cultural or collective memory, or consciousness.

Elson’s poem takes her across the threshold and

allows her to see, or perhaps it is better to say

envision, a picture that connects all that has been with

all that is and may be. In this way the poem offers us

an example of geographical intimacy that connects place,

time and memory in and through the human body via the

quality of feeling. I suggest that this is akin to

Capra’s idea of how ‘ecological awareness arises from an

intuition of nonlinear systems’ and that Elson achieves

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an intuitive feel, not only for her own body but also for

the body of the Earth and the creatures that have

inhabited it.

In the next chapter I will continue to develop the

idea of geographical intimacy by considering love as a

necessary element of intimate relationships. I will

explore the ways in which love influences the quality of

connection we achieve with language, the land, and the

process of writing itself.

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Chapter 3: Love the Source and Love the Transgressor

Exploring love as an inspirational energy that allows the poet to dissolve walls, extend care to others, and create a more inclusive landscape.

John Berger, in his essay, ‘The Hour of Poetry’, suggests

that ‘poetry reunites by its ‘reach’. The reach he refers

to is one where feeling and the universe come together in

language. Through this language the poem extends care

into a cruel world by making everything intimate. Berger

writes:

Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result of the poem’s labour, the result of bringing-together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem refers. There is oftennothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the world than this caring. (Berger, 2001, p.451)

Berger explicitly places intimacy at the heart of poetry

and then goes on to emphasise the substantiality of a

poem in a world that is often cruel and indifferent. I

love him for this, for according gravitas to the poem and

for naming intimacy as the ‘result of the poem’s labour’.

In doing so he honours the long hours that every poet

spends alone as they listen to the arriving words, and he

honours the courage of the poet whose work sometimes

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incurs the wrath of dictators and leads to imprisonment.

Imagine, being put in prison for writing a poem15: imagine

the power of the poem, the strength of those few,

intimate words, the threat in the intimacy that the poet

creates, the disturbance caused by this caring.

Berger suggests that ‘poetry makes language care’ by

rendering everything intimate. In this way, language

itself is reinvigorated by poetry. He also talks of

intimacy as the result of the poet’s labour, the work

that can ‘bring-together-into-intimacy every act and noun

and event and perspective’. With this in mind I wish to

consider, ‘The Poet’s Obligation’, by the Chilean poet,

Pablo Neruda. In the poem, the poet addresses ‘whoever

is cooped up’ in a factory or mine or prison, and then

promises to open the door, to release them from

incarceration. He achieves this monumental task by

keeping ‘the sea’s lamenting in my awareness’ for he

must:

feel the crash of the hard water15 I am a member English PEN: ‘PEN is a registered charity (number 1125610), whose work ranges from defending the rights of persecuted writers to promoting literature in translation and running writing workshops in schools, English PEN seeks to  promote literature as a means of greater understanding between the world's people’ (taken from Pen’s website: www.englishpen.org).

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and gather it up in a perpetual cupso that, wherever those in prison may be,wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn,I may be present with an errant wave (Neruda, 2005,

p.620)

Intimacy, in this poem, is located in the poet’s ability

to be aware. The sea is a symbol of freedom, it is

something that cannot be contained or controlled by human

beings. Neruda takes the sea’s lament inside of himself

by gathering ‘it up in a perpetual cup’. Only an

imaginary, eternal cup could hold the sea and the sea’s

crash, the energy of the ocean, the force needed to break

through suffering and bring relief. Neruda carries the

‘errant wave’ and in doing so fulfils the poet’s

obligation by extending liberty to all people.

The poem concludes, ‘through me, freedom and the sea

/ will make their answer to the shuttered heart’ (ibid).

These words are a salve for the wounded man or woman,

because Neruda creates a communality of space that

excludes no-one. In this imagined, or liminal place, the

prisoner’s door opens and they taste a liberty that is

symbolised by the sea. This is a radical positioning of

the poet’s ability to care: through language, Neruda

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dissolves the prison wall and touches the ‘shuttered

heart’. Given that Neruda experienced the murderous

dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile, his words

achieve even greater resonance. This is no imagined

reach or care that we are considering here: it is an

intimacy that touches and changes people’s lives. It is

a care inspired by a love that the poet Peter Abbs refers

to as one that provokes a ‘sense of universal solidarity’ (Abbs,

2002, p.16).

At this point it is helpful to reconsider the idea

of a ‘place’ and to expand upon Hooker’s notion of the

‘deep channel’. Hooker has already suggested that the

poet steps beyond, what Raine referred to as ‘limited

perception’, into a threshold that allows the unseen to

be seen. Denise Levertov refers to this threshold in a

slightly different way, and the subtle distinction that

she makes is, I believe, more apposite when considering

the work of Neruda and the ‘reach’ that Berger speaks of.

In the course of an interview, she makes the following

comments:

….the border line between the conscious and unconscious, the realm of the intuitive, the

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sensuous music that evokes, and the image that presents and synthesizes, in contrast to the paraphrasable arguments of expository prose, have always been the territory of poetry. Poetry can narrate, explain, argue, and meditate, but its home base is that borderland you call “no-man’s land” andwhich I would call “everyman’s land”. (Brooker, 1998, p.70)

Levertov, like Hooker, situates poetry in a place that is

between the ‘conscious and unconscious’ but she then goes

on to name this borderland, or threshold, as ‘everyman’s

land’. This is an important development because it

reverberates with Berger’s idea of ‘reach’ and also with

Neruda’s creation of an imagined space where freedom can

dissolve prison walls and make its answer to the

‘shuttered heart’. In an imaginative geography, the poet

creates an ‘everyman’s land’ through her labour, her

awareness and her bringing everything together in

intimacy. In this way intimacy becomes a transgressive

act motivated by love and care and language. Like

Neruda, Levertov was also politically active and

participated in protests16 against the Vietnam war and the

situation in El Salvador. In this sense, both Levertov 16 Levertov joined in with protests and also wrote poems about and against war. Examples of this include the poem ‘What Were They Like?’ which reflects on the Vietnam war and ‘For Chile, 1977’. Bothpoems can be found in Selected Poems (Levertov, 1986).

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and Neruda are aware of ‘cruelty and indifference’ and

write poems to actively counteract this cruelty.

To further ground intimacy in the poet’s experience

of writing, I wish to recall Prager’s idea that there

needs to be ‘sustained affection (or love)’ between

partners. Can we consider the relationship between the

poet and language, as well as between the poet and her

environment, as a partnership? If so, then how will this

help us to continue exploring the framework of

geographical intimacy? The French poet Hélène Cixous

writes the following about her relationship with writing

and language:

Because I write for, I write from, I start writing from: Love. I write out of love. Writing, loving: inseparable. Writing is a gesture of love. The Gesture.

[…] Writing with love, loving with writing. Love opens up the body without which writing becomesatrophied. (Cixous, 1991, p.42)

The pulse is quickened by words such as these; there is a

fever at work here, one that presses us against the

brevity of our existence and propels us towards fruition.

Writing and love are located within the body, the body of

the poet, and in this sense the whole of the person is

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drawn into being through language. The poet, then,

achieves not only the poem but also her existence from

this ground of loving.

Although Cixous is more commonly referred to as a

writer or theorist, she calls herself a poet. She

explains her reasons for this with the following:

I call poet any writing being who sets out on this path, in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know. (Cixous, 1991, p.xii)

Curiosity, then, is central to the poet’s practice. This

idea has already been borne out in the work of Elson,

Merwin, Borges and Mackay Brown – this inimitable need to

‘not know’, to be able to ask questions. Curiosity

invigorates love and language and enables a healthy and

sustained relationship to develop. It is the same with

the land: an approach based upon ‘not knowing’ is

crucial, for only in this way is the writer able to forge

a connection that is based upon genuine care and

curiosity rather than a preconceived notion of how things

should be. This is what enables the poet to enter the

threshold, or every-man’s land, a place that is unknown

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and where all previous understandings must be

relinquished in order to become a part of that which

cannot be contained, regulated or mapped in the first

instance. Instead, the poet must listen and intuit and

become aware of whatever words or ideas arise. In this

other place we find the things that we did not know we

were looking for and that we may not have known existed.

I suggest that it is by meeting the unknown in

ourselves that we are able to relate to the constantly

shifting and unknown qualities of a landscape and a

language. In this way, everything comes to life. The

ecological philosopher Freya Mathews frames this

experience between a human being and a responsive world

as one of encounter and interactivity. She writes in her

book, For Love of Matter:

Every action we take, every posture we assume, now becomes an interaction with a responsive world: all activity, whether epistemological or otherwise, is aform of interactivity. (Mathews, 2003, p.88)

In other words, I am alive. The world is alive. We

are alive. The land is not something that I act upon,

rather it is something that I live with17. We are

17 The physicist David Bohm, who struggled with being able to express his experimental findings in a language that necessitated an object,

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interacting with one another and we are forever

responding to one another.

Eight years ago, in the kitchen of a grand country

house just outside of Bath in Somerset, I was introduced

to a man called Josiah Hincks. We enjoyed a lengthy

conversation about artistic process and the ways in

which, as a poet, I felt as if I was constantly entering

unknown territory. For me, no poem arises without there

being some degree of feeling lost, of having no clue as

to what it is I am going to write, or where an initiating

idea might take me. It is the act of writing itself that

creates the territory, that alchemical moment of ink or

lead touching paper. Hincks recommended I read the work

of Jack Gilbert, a poet from Pittsburgh in the United

States, and it is his work that I now wish to consider in

relation to sustained affection or love as an integral

element of the poet’s craft.

subject and verb, writes the following in relation to this process: ‘Thus instead of saying ‘An observer looks at an object’, we can moreappropriately say, ‘Observation is going on, in an undivided movementinvolving those abstractions customarily called “the human being” and“the object he is looking at”’(Bohm, 2000, p.29). The pertinent thing here is the identification of an ‘undivided movement’ which canneither be attributed to the subject nor the object. Bohm also writes, ‘Elementary particles are on-going movements that are mutually dependent because ultimately they merge and interpenetrate’ (ibid).

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In Gilbert’s poem, ‘Half the Truth’, the poet is

writing about his garden in winter. The trees are

stripped of leaves, the flowers have gone and there are

only cabbages left. Gilbert writes:

Truth becomes visible,the architecture of the soul begins to show through.We are returned to what lay beneath the beauty.

(Gilbert, 1994, p.85)

Stripped of ornament, Gilbert perceives truth in the

‘bedraggled’ garden. What this truth might be, or whose

soul he is referring to, is not clear but we do know that

we are being returned to something that lay beneath the

beauty of a garden in full bloom. This introduces the

idea of a cycle, of the way in which truth was

momentarily masked only to be revealed again. He goes on

to say:

We make love without rushing and find ourselvesafterward with someone we know well. Time to bewhat we are getting ready to be next. This loving,this relishing, our gladness, this being puts downroots and comes back again year after year. (ibid)

We come to realise that the soul that Gilbert refers

to is both the soul of the garden and the human soul for

he implies that the two are inter-connected, that their

processes and cyclic movements mirror one another. Both

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the lovers and the garden are entering a time when they

can prepare for whatever they will be ‘next’. The

intimacy between the lovers coalesces with an intimate

awareness of nature in the garden and the way in which

‘this loving […] puts down / roots and comes back again

year after year’. Love, in this poem, is not just

between two people but also between those people and the

garden. It implies that the act of love-making between

humans is akin to the love-making that occurs when you

plant a bulb in the ground or when an already planted

flower or tree extends its roots into the quiet winter

earth. The labour of love leads to the putting down of

roots and these roots then return our love back to us.

Cixous develops this idea of coupling and generation when

she writes of love as the:

Source that gives the meaning and the impulse to allthe other sources, illuminates History for me, brings to life all the scenes of the real, and givesme my births every day. It opens the earth for me and I spring forth.

(Cixous, 1991, p.43)

Love, then, connects us not only with each other but also

with the earth. It is perhaps the most important element

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of this connection, because it is based upon genuine

feeling.

The thirteenth century Persian poet, Rumi, advocated

awareness through love (Talat Sait Halman/Metin And,

1983, p101). Much of his poetry is concerned with

encapsulating an expression of mystical love, for

example:

This moment this love comes to rest in me,many beings in one being.In one wheat grain a thousand sheaf stacks.Inside the needle’s eye a turning night of stars.

(Rumi, 1995, p.278)

Rumi was always pushing against constrictive boundaries

and, as a founder of the Mevlevi sect of whirling

dervishes, he immersed himself in experiences of ecstasy

that led to an appreciation of limitlessness. Within

this limitlessness he found plurality, ‘many beings in

one being’ and this plurality applies to the natural

world that is to be found both inside of, and outside of,

the human being. ‘Being’ is not exclusively human for

there is also life to be found in a grain of wheat. We

are now in the disruptive heart of intimacy, where love

opens doors, dissolves walls and renders the familiar

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unfamiliar. This idea is endorsed by Catherine Belsey

when she notes:

Unfixed, unsatisfied, the human being is not a unity, not autonomous, but a process, perpetually inconstruction, perpetually contradictory, perpetuallyopen to change. (Belsey, 1980, p.132)

In the same way, the earth is also unfixed and in a

continual state of change, as we see in the following

passage:

The Earth recycles rocks by natural processes that, even as they are finishing in one place, are starting again elsewhere. All of Earth’s minerals and rocks follow a cycle of continuous breakdown andrebirth, a process driven by plate tectonics. On theone hand, minerals are being crystallized from magma, sediments are being cemented into rocks, and rocks are being reformed by high heat and pressure. On the other hand, as physical changes occur, particles are being eroded from rocks, dissolving inwater, and being moved by rivers, ice, wind, and gravity. (Busby III et al., 1996, p.54)

When we look beneath the surface, we come to see the

ways in which nothing is standing still. No rock or

stone is immune from a process of change. In nature,

these processes are often so slow they can take millions

of years to manifest. Within a human life-span however,

changes are made evident much more quickly. What becomes

clear is that an understanding of geographical intimacy,

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both in the human being and in the landscape, requires an

aptitude for embracing an instability that is vast and

timeless, tiny and timeful. Cixous encapsulates this

paradoxical idea by rooting it in love. She writes:

Love gives me the space and the desire for endlessness. Ten thousand lives don’t cover a singlepage of it. What misfortune! What a blessing! My littleness, what luck! Not knowing the limit! Being in touch with the more-than-me! Gives me the strength to want all the mysteries, to love them, tolove the threat in them, the disturbing strangeness.Love reaches me. Its face: its thousands of new faces. (Cixous, 1991, p.44)

To ‘love the disturbing strangeness’ is an exquisite

rendering of what this chapter is seeking to exemplify,

for it is possibly only love that will permit us to

accept and relish that which is disturbing and strange in

our nature. This includes the strange and disturbing

tempests, storms, rogue waves, and impetuous, impossible

moods that every human being at some time experiences.

In Gilbert’s first book, The Great Fires, there is a

poem called ‘I Imagine The Gods’, in which Gilbert is

given three wishes. He asks to ‘see the squirrels again’

and to eat ‘some of the great hog / stuffed and roasted

on its giant spit’. The Gods are not amused by his

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request for such simple things. They prompt him to ask

for wisdom and fame but Gilbert ignores this and asks to

be allowed to revisit the moment when an Algerian student

invited him into her room, when he was too ‘young and

bewildered’ to accept. He then asks:

Let me at least fail at my life. (Gilbert, 2001,

p.72)

This line transports me into the heart of love, a place

where being frail, human and allowed to fail is valued

above cultural norms and embedded suppositions that value

success above failure. It is a radical request, strange

and disturbing, but it deepens my affinity with a poet

who exposes and cherishes his vulnerability. This is

liberating: permission to fail is always liberating. It

gives rise to all other things; it allows the poet to

step aside from wisdom and success, to disinhabit that

which is familiar and instead walk into the unknown18.

How does Gilbert arrive at the place where he is

able to ask for this? On the back cover of The Great Fires,

18 There is a reminder of Eliot’s Four Quartets here: ‘In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance’ (Eliot,1995, p.17).

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James Dickey offers the following endorsement of

Gilbert’s work:

He takes himself away to a place more inward than issafe to go: from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.

(ibid)

Perhaps every inward journey is dangerous because we do

not know what we are going to find in the ‘awful

silence’. The inner landscape, or ‘inscape’ as Gerard

Manley Hopkins called it, is as real as the outer

landscape but few have the courage to really explore it.

Rilke comments upon this when he writes:

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident thatmost people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. (Rilke, 1993, p.68)

The absence of security for the person who dares to go

beyond this narrow ‘strip of floor’ means that the poet

has to rely upon her own thoughts, intuitions and

feelings in order to be able to navigate. In the heart

of the lone individual, however, lies the deepest paradox

of all because it is here that universal, or cosmic,

desires are found.

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Gilbert’s poem concludes:

Let me fallin love one last time, I beg them.Teach me mortality, frighten meinto the present. Help me to findthe heft of these days. That the nightswill be full enough and my heart feral. (ibid)

It is possible that the gods were testing Gilbert by

tempting him with chimaeric and worldly gifts. If this

is so, then Gilbert’s final wish to fall in love shows

that his intelligence outstrips the narrow confines of

temporal desire, for he wants the one gift that will

bring all other gifts, namely love19. I will return to

the idea of ‘mortality’ in the next chapter, but for now

I wish to emphasise that it is an untamed, uncultivated

heart that possesses the potential to continually

reinvent itself in love. It is not concerned with

convention; it retains its original nature. The feral

heart is still in possession of hunger: this is a

motivating factor, one that brings energy and life, a

19 I wonder if there is an allusion to Dante’s Divina Commedia here. Kathleen Raine observes the following about Dante’s journey: ‘But in order to to enter the heavens, the worlds of the blessed spirits who behold God, wisdom does not suffice; and it is here that Beatrice comes to meet him; and it is she, the embodiment of love – of heavenly love, the love of the soul – who must lead him into those higher worlds or states that knowledge alone cannot enter.’ (Raine, 1982, p.31)

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fullness that cannot be found in wisdom and fame. It

maps the wild place within and reasserts a lineage that

quietly enfolds, and holds to the presence of the animal

within the human being. The choice of the word ‘feral’,

from the Latin ‘fera’, meaning a wild beast, establishes

Gilbert as a protector of the nature reserve of the soul,

a warden who has enough integrity and insight to

encounter the wilderness within.

In this chapter I have given consideration to the

importance of love, or sustained affection, as an

essential feature of intimacy. I am arguing that the

further we dare to delve within, the further we are then

able to delve into that which surrounds us. To begin to

realise an interactive encounter with the land, we need

to plumb the depths of ourselves and move beyond the

boundaries that confine us to that which is familiar and

known. Here, we are able to conceive a shifting world, a

shifting self, a plurality that will not be pinned down.

A brief poem by Rumi emphasises this connection between

the inner and outer worlds:

I have lived on the lipof insanity, wanting to know reasons,

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knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside! (Rumi, 1995,

p.281)

To conclude, I wish to return briefly to Berger’s

idea of the way in which a poem is ‘the result of

bringing-together-into-intimacy’. For me, this refers to

the process of recollection that is central to a poet’s

process. A poem is rarely, if ever, written in the

moment of experience. Instead, it is recalled at a later

moment, when enough time has passed for the poet to be

able to see, or hear, more clearly. Levertov describes

this process of recollection in the following way:

The battle scene is hard to write of clearly while one is in its noise and dust and immediate physical danger but to write of it accurately in the quiet ofa solitary room later one must expose oneself to thepainful – and exciting – reliving of its terrors andits energies. This is “the work of the imagination” – an activity, kinetic, dynamic. (Brooker, 1998, p.70)

This re-experiencing allows for a transmutation of

understanding to occur and shows how the seemingly

passive activity of recollection is in fact ‘an

activity’. Poems are born from this process precisely

because the poet is able to intimately resurrect the

external landscape within themselves. Only then can the

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‘deep channel’ be opened and the narrowness of perception

be blown wide open.

In the next chapter I will progress our

understanding of geographical intimacy by examining the

ways in which mortality heightens our awareness of

landscape and our connections with it. We are going to

die, and when we die we return to the earth; we will

become a part of the soil and the rocks, part of the

oceans and the great web of life that was here before us

and will be here after we have gone. Gaston Bachelard

writes in The Poetics of Space:

All important words, all the words marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to thedual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit. (Bachelard, 1994, p.xxiii)

It is precisely this dual universe that informs and

underpins the unfolding ideological framework of

geographical intimacy.

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Chapter 4: Death and Impurity

Asking the question: how can you know this land you talk of without knowing the dead who inhabit it too?

The previous three chapters have been concerned with

creating a framework for geographical intimacy based upon

love or sustained affection, partner cohesiveness and

mutual sharing. In this chapter, I wish to extend the

framework to include our ancestors, those who have died,

our dead friends, family and strangers, the ones who are

no longer with us, because I do not believe it is

possible to have a feel for the land without having an

awareness of the millions of people who are buried within

it20.

In terms of intimacy, the ability to know our dead

is related to trust. If we trust that the land has

sustained and nurtured those who have gone before, then

we can also trust that it will sustain those who come

after us, for how can we conceive of our futures if we do

20 I have often wondered if a conference based upon grief might be more instrumental in motivating people to care about the Earth. If we were to grieve for what is being lost, then we might come to valuemore what we have. Morton suggests that: ‘Now is a time for grief topersist, to ring throughout the world. Modern culture has not yet known what to do with grief.’ (Morton, 2007, p.185)

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not equally conceive of our pasts? Chief Seathl

expresses this in the following way:

You must teach your children that the ground beneaththeir

feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will

respect the land, tell your children that the land is rich

with the lives of our kin. (Seathl, 1994)

In his poem, ‘I Imagine The Gods’, Jack Gilbert

asked to be taught mortality (Gilbert, 2001, p.72), as if

this was something that mattered and needed to be

learned. It was a curious request but I suggest that

learning about death, learning that this life is brief,

finite, sharpens our awareness and pushes us towards an

appreciation of what is here, now. Hélène Cixous

reflects upon the way in which our proximity to death can

illuminate life. She writes:

For it is also as a result of death and thanks to death that we discover the splendor of life. It is death that makes us remember the treasures life contains, with all its living misfortunes and its pleasures. (Cixous, 1991, p.137)

Gilbert wants to know the pleasures and the misfortunes

for both are equally a part of being alive. This

affinity with the dead, and an awareness of mortality, is

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territory that I am familiar with. From the beginning, I

have felt as close to the dead as to the living. My

mother miscarried five boys before I was born and

although I didn’t know this when I was growing up I have

talked with invisible beings in the wind since I first

learned to speak. The presence of the dead was always as

real to me as the presence of the living. You may find

this a little peculiar, and perhaps it is, but to me it

was also entirely natural and has significantly

contributed to my life as a writer. Margaret Atwood, in

her book, Negotiating With The Dead, reflects upon this:

…all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

You may find the subject a little peculiar. It is a little peculiar. Writing itself is a little peculiar. (Atwood, 2003, p.140)

It is in the process of death that we, as human

beings, return to the land. Whether we are cremated or

buried, the bodies that we once inhabited become a part

of the fabric of the world that the living still inhabit.

We become bodies buried in the ground, ashes scattered on

the ground, we are buried at sea, we disperse into the

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wind. Our relationship with death and the dead underpins

our relationship with life and the living: the two are

inseparable.

In the poem, ‘Married’, Jack Gilbert confronts the

loss he experiences after the death of his wife, Michiko.

He searches for evidence of his deceased wife’s existence

in the form of her hair. After the funeral he crawls

around the apartment, crying and ‘searching for my wife’s

hair’ (Gilbert, 2001, p.19). He is successful to begin

with, finding hairs in the vacuum cleaner, under the

fridge and on clothes, but this search eventually becomes

a fruitless task because he cannot distinguish her hairs

from those of other Japanese women who come to visit. At

this point Michiko’s individuality has blurred and as a

consequence he stops looking for her. In the final three

lines of the poem however, he finds one of Michiko’s

hairs tangled in the dirt where an avocado is growing.

He writes:

A year later,repotting Michiko’s avocado, I finda long black hair tangled in the dirt. (ibid)

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This ending throws us back to the title of the poem,

‘Married’, and by inference

shows that his wife is not only married to him but,

because of her death, she is also married to the dirt of

the earth. She is in the loam that allows a plant to

grow and, in a sense, the poet is not only repotting the

plant and giving it more room, but he is also

repotting/relocating the presence of his wife in a more

spacious realm. The body returned to the earth becomes

food that nourishes other growing things; in this case,

not only the avocado, but also the poet’s connection with

his wife.

To deepen this understanding further, we need only

look at the mythical significance of hair. In The Woman’s

Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker writes:

As shown by its importance in witch-charms and in the mutual exchange of talismans between lovers, hair was usually viewed as a repository of at least a part of the soul. (Walker, 1983, p.367)

If a part of Michiko’s soul is in the hair that is

tangled in the dirt, then the poet has reconnected with

the soul of his wife. In making this reconnection he

also acknowledges the way in which her soul has left her

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body and become one again with the body of the earth.

She is now rooted in a different place and time, and

through her the poet is married not only to her memory

but also to the infinite darkness where she resides.

In the poem, ‘Michiko Nogami (1946 – 1982)’, Gilbert

wrestles with the paradox of how the dead are, at once,

more present in their absence and the way in which that

absence can fill the world. He writes:

Is she more apparent because she is notanymore forever? (Gilbert, 2001, p.47)

then later,

A dead woman filling the whole world. (ibid)

It is as if, in connecting with her ephemeral soul, the

poet experiences the vastness of that soul in stark

contrast to the limitations that existed when she was

alive. Now that Michiko has no body, she fills the world

and is more apparent precisely because she was not

‘forever’ in human form. Endlessness then, is perhaps

accessed through our proximity to the dead; they are our

bridge to elsewhere, to the place that knows no bounds.

These ideas are also explored in the poem

‘Betrothed’ where Gilbert writes:

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…The blackand white of me mated with this indifferent winter landscape. (Gilbert, 2001, p.29)

This poem is a meditation upon aloneness, upon a man who

has no living lover in the world. Instead he is ‘mated’

with the landscape, the place into which his lover has

gone. This mating endorses the marriage that was

suggested in ‘Married’ but it also introduces the notion

of indifference. This is radically unromantic in the

sense that his wife, who has become one with the land, no

longer affiliates herself solely with him. Personal

union, enshrined in the sanctity of marriage, ceases to

be relevant when the soul has left the individual body

and become part of something much larger. The poet has

lost his lover and, although he finds himself mated with

the landscape, he can no longer claim the woman he called

Michiko as his own. She has been freed into a place of

dispossession, the land of the dead, and the poet must

somehow muster the strength needed to accept his

continuing marriage and the loss that this brings.

Death and nature, like life and nature, are

irreconcilably linked in the body of the land. This is

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also evidenced in Shelley’s poem, ‘Adonais’, an elegy on

the death of John Keats. Shelley writes:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moanOf thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;He is a presence to be felt and knownIn darkness and in light, from herb and stone

[1821] (Shelley, 1935, p.436).

In death, Keats has become one with Nature and his voice

is now no longer limited to a human body but dispersed

throughout the body of the Earth21. His presence is at

once everywhere and nowhere, withdrawn into what Shelley

later refers to as that ‘Power’. In Elegy, David Kennedy

draws our attention to how:

elegists are always faced with unsatisfactory resurrections, unfinished and unfinishable conversations. (Kennedy, 2007, p. 21)

Whilst it is true that the conversations may never

finish, I suggest that this is entirely in keeping with

the nature of the land to which the dead person has

returned. As we have already seen, the Earth is

continually in process and therefore always in a state of

21 Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ speaks of the fear of giving up the individual self to nature as a wider body, and acknowledges the sadness of everything changing. Part two begins, ‘“O little Cloud,” the Virgin said, “I charge thee tell to me / why thou complainest not, when in one hour thou fade away: / Then we shall seek thee, but not find.”’ [1789] (Blake, 1960, p.242)

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incompleteness. The elegist, in this sense, is intimate

not only with what has been lost but also with the

realities of what their loved one has been lost to.

Neruda’s poem, ‘El Cazador en el Bosque’, (The

Hunter in the Forest) reiterates the way in which the

Earth receives the dead. He writes,

cuanto muere recogecomo una anciana hambrienta:todo se pudre en ella. (Neruda, 1982, p238)

(Whatever dies, it gathers in like an ancient, hungry creature.Everything rots away in it – ) (trns. Reid, 1982,

p239).

The Earth receives everything that dies and implicit in

this is the understanding that the poet will also die one

day and be gathered into the body of that ‘hungry

creature’. This awareness, unsentimental and unromantic,

identifies the poet as someone who accords the land with

the ability to embrace, and rejuvenate through a process

of rotting, everything that dies. This situates an

intimacy with death at the heart of our understanding of

landscape: how can we touch this soil or walk through a

field without being aware of the things that have gone

into its making? Geographical intimacy thus includes a

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relationship with the cycles of life and death in a way

that does not idealise or diminish the significance of

either.

The American poet, Robert Bly, writes of Neruda:

He is a new kind of creature moving about under the surface of everything. Moving under the earth, he knows everything from the bottom up (which is the right way to learn the nature of a thing) and therefore is never at a loss for its name. (Bly, 1993, pp.14/15)

Here, we are able to identify a seemingly contradictory

and parallel movement with regard to the poet’s ability

to achieve an expression of geographical intimacy. On

the one hand, the poet needs to enter the ‘deep channel’

that enables her to step outside of a time-limited and

sense-limited awareness whilst on the other hand the poet

also needs to enter the sensual reality of time-limited

experience as it is known and felt within the body. This

paradoxically leads the poet into the recesses of her own

being at the same time as catapulting her into a sense of

being that is beyond the confines an individual self. In

acknowledging this, we are able to more clearly apprehend

the complex layering of poetry in relation to landscape

because there is no easy or singular correlation between

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the one and the other. Instead, we begin to glimpse the

evolution of a relationship between the two, which

confounds any simple idea, or notion of what landscape or

nature poetry might be. Neruda himself argues for what

he refers to as an ‘Impure Poetry’:

Let that be the poetry we search for […] A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylsand beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes. (Neruda, 2005, p.39)

If this is the poetry we search for, then it follows that

this is the nature, both human and environmental, that we

search for – a nature that includes the ‘confused

impurity of the human condition’ and what may equally be

seen as the impurity22 of the environmental condition.

D.H. Lawrence’s poem, ‘Elemental’, expresses a remarkably

similar sentiment. He writes:

Why don’t people leave off being lovableor thinking they are lovable, or wanting to be

lovable,and be a bit elemental instead?

22 It must be noted that there is a difference between an impure environment and a ravaged, or poisoned environment. ‘Impure’, here, means acknowledging the reality of things as they are. An example ofthis might be to speak of the manure and shit that fertilises the ground rather than seeing a field as something that is simply green and fruitful.

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Since man is made up of the elementsfire, and rain, and air, and live loamand none of these is lovablebut elemental,man is lop-sided on the side of the angels.

(Lawrence, 1932, p.95) Gifford states that ‘Lawrence’s project is nothing

less than the reintegration of inner nature with a

creative-destructive universe’ (Gifford, 2008, p.74). If

we achieve an appreciation of this elemental impurity, it

becomes more difficult, if not impossible, to think of a

landscape in an idealised way. That an idealised, rural

picture has often been a part of our thinking and

pastoral tradition is verified by Richard Muir:

The idyllic village may well be illusory, but this is not to say that it is without influence. It is, in fact, a symbol of durability and great power, andmany of those who died fighting for England were motivated by visions of wholesome rural communities and cottage huddles. (Muir, 1999, p.139)

Lawrence and Neruda, then, encourage us to see the

impurities that exist rather than being lulled into

seeing an idyll that we would prefer to exist. This

idyll, however, is difficult to dislodge from our way of

seeing landscapes because, as D. Matless observes:

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When we enter the realms of landscape perception, weencounter facets of the scene which are ‘seen’ not because they are really there but because observers expected to see them there. (Matless, 1994, p.145)

It is not always easy to see what is really there: as a

poet I need to continually relearn how to see (often

through the practice of drawing) and to look again and

again, with persistent vigilance. Even so, it is worth

asking how do we avoid falling into the trap of

recreating ‘pure’ or idealised pictures and how, as

writers, we find a more elemental perception?23

This question is continually alive for me in my

current environment. At present, I am living on an

extraordinarily beautiful and rugged peninsula in North

Devon. In summer, or whenever it is warm enough, I swim

at Hartland Quay or Berry beach. This latter beach is

mostly frequented by locals, some of whom can trace their

lineage back through more than six generations. They

know this beach well and are familiar with the rip

currents and other dangers presented by this particular

strip of Atlantic ocean. Two years ago a man who had

been swimming at Berry for more than twenty years was

23 Please see Appendix 1, (p. 196), for a writing exercise designed tosharpen powers of observation.

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swept out to sea by a rogue wave. He was paddling at the

time and waving to his family who were watching him from

the beach. The wave stole his footing and although

people raced in to save him, it was too late. Battered

against the sharp, black rocks, he was dead within

minutes.

The strength of a single rogue wave on a sunny

summer’s day surprised and terrified everyone. None of

us can look at the cobalt blue waves, the island of Lundy

in the distance, the sand sparkling with sunlight,

without also seeing the dead man, his terrified wife, his

screaming children. Our love of this beach is not

diminished however, but somehow the intimacy is deepened

and the disturbing nature of the sea, reaffirmed. The

waters in which I swim are coloured with the blood of

those who have died in them and this includes the sailors

who were murdered along this coast when the practice of

wrecking24 was at its height. Knowledge, at least a

living knowledge of death and murder, means that the

24 Wrecking was a practice that involved standing on the cliffs with lights in order to lure ships onto the rocks below. The cargoes were then plundered and many of the people on board the ship murdered. Daphne DuMaurier’s novel, Jamaica Inn, offers an account of this practice.

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potential idyll of landscape is shattered. In its place

we encounter the impurity that Neruda speaks of and from

this we can begin to conceive of a poetics that addresses

the reality of a landscape in her nurturing and murderous

guises as well as, as Gilbert called it, her

‘indifferent’ one too.

If we conceive of a full, real and natural landscape

in the world, then we are also able to conceive of this

within. In Kathleen Jamie’s essay, ‘Pathologies’, Jamie,

whose mother has just died, recounts her experience of

attending a conference about writers and the environment.

Although the conference is packed with impassioned

speakers speaking about reconnecting with nature, she is

left with the feeling that ‘nature’ is being viewed in a

troubling way. She writes:

Perhaps I was still tired from my mother’s death, thin-skinned and bad tempered, but when the day ended with time for questions, I had some turning inmy head, though I didn’t raise my hand. Questions about ‘nature’ mostly, which we were exhorted to embrace. What was it exactly, and where did it reside? I’d felt something at my mother’s bedside, almost an animal presence.

(Jamie, 2008, p.36)

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I am interested in Jamie’s questions: what is nature and

where does it reside? All too often there is the

assumption that these things do not need to be asked

because it is assumed we already know the answers. In

the light of her mother’s death however, Jamie’s world

has shifted and a fissure has opened up in her thinking.

Jamie knows she felt ‘something’, and this feeling is

important. It connects her with an animal presence and

it takes her into an intelligence that is apprehended

through bodily experience, through feeling rather than

thinking.

In an attempt to answer her unasked questions, Jamie

approached Professor Frank Carey, clinical consultant in

pathology at Ninewells Hopsital in Dundee, with a view to

spending time with him and investigating what she refers

to as ‘the foreshortened definition of nature’ (Jamie,

2008, p.37). She tells him about the environmentalists’

and writers’ conference and her ensuing belief that

nature is not ‘all primroses and dolphins’ but must

equally encompass our own ‘innate, intimate, inner

natural world’ which she later refers to as ‘the nature

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within’. What ensues is a very real examination of the

human body – in this instance, diseased liver tissue,

seen through a microscope. Jamie writes:

The microscope was a double-headed one which allowedus both to see the same slide, and for one unused tomicroscopes, it was like slipping into a dream. I was admitted to another world, where everything was pink. We were looking from a great height down at a pink river – rather, an estuary, with a north bank and a south. There were wing-shaped river islands and furthermore it was low tide, with sand banks exposed. It was astonishing, a map of the familiar: it was our local river, as seen by a hawk. (Jamie, 2008, p.41-2)

The magnifying power of the microscope offers Jamie an

entrance into another world, another geography, one that

is rooted inside the human body. She likens the

experience to a dream and this is significant. In the

dream, it is no longer necessary to cleave to previously

understood ideas of how things are or how they should be.

In the dreamscape, all things are possible.

The liver tissue resembles an estuary, and nature,

as it is more conventionally understood, is resituated

inside the human body. The two become twinned and

analogous: the geographical terrain of a landscape

becomes equally applicable to the body’s internal vistas

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as seen through a microscope as well as those vistas that

are seen out with the body. In the microscopic

countryside that exists in our flesh, Jamie finds a new

reading of what nature might be. She is not alone in

doing this, as we can see in the following quotation from

Leonardo da Vinci:

his body is an analogue of the word; just as man hasin himself bones, the supports and armature of his flesh, the world has the rocks, supports of the soil; just as man has in himself the lake of the blood, in which the lungs increase and decrease in breathing, so the body of the earth has its oceanic sea which likewise increases and decreases every sixhours with the breathing of the world; just as in that lake of blood the veins originate, which make ramifications throughout the human body, so the oceanic sea fills the body of the earth with infinite veins of water. [1490] (cited in Kemp, 2006, p.88)

It is the death of Jamie’s mother that leads her to

ask what nature might be and where it might reside.

Through the asking of these questions, she discovers

images of the intimate outer world reflected in the

intimate inner world, a geographical intimacy that cannot

be said to exist in any one place but rather in various

places at one and the same time. Just as the dead no

longer inhabit a specific body, or even a specific plot

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of land once the rotting process has begun, neither can

the land ever be truly seen as a fixed or static thing.

Death introduces us to movement, to a different

conceptualisation of aliveness, and intimacy with this

requires that we trust these processes of life and death,

and accept that things are being continually recycled and

transformed. None of us can escape this, and the moment

we draw close to the land and the life of the land then

we necessarily come into contact with the cyclical nature

of all things.

In the next chapter I will give special

consideration to the art of fusion, or interfusion.

Interfusion was commonly referred to by the Romantic

poets, but it appears to have almost disappeared from our

current vocabulary. By including interfusion in

geographical intimacy we will be able to add another

layer to our understanding of what it might mean to

connect with, or have a feel for, the Earth.

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Chapter 5: The Possibilities of Interfusion

The origins of interfusion and working towards an embodied experience of this process.

In the preceding chapters I have begun to tease out some

of the features of geographical intimacy in poetry as a

way of constructing an ideological framework that will

help us address the question of how to connect with, and

establish a feel for, the land. So far, I have

identified the following elements of intimacy as

important: the ability to know a landscape through close

proximity with it as well as through maintaining

distance; an experience of cohesiveness with the past

that can be reached through the human body, and a

visceral appreciation of evolution: an awareness of the

way in which poetry can reach beyond anything known and

create an inclusive, imagined geographical terrain; the

strong, initiating impulse of love in writing and in all

relationships; an ability to see the land as the place

where our dead have gone and the transformational aspects

of this; the need to connect the inner human landscape

with the external landscape of the world.

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In this thesis I am seeking to establish the

relevance of applying definitions of intimacy between

humans to the relationships that can be forged between

human beings and their environments. If we consider the

following statement from the psychologist, Prager, then

it becomes possible to think that our well-being actually

depends upon this:

It is important to understand how intimate behaviourelicits intimate experience, because intimacy’s beneficial effects on individual health and well-being likely stem from effects of intimate experiences that are repeated over time. (Prager, 1995, p.171)

In this chapter, I will consider the idea and experience

of interfusion in relation to this.

Interfusion can be understood as a process that

joins one thing with another. An early example of this

can be found in Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles

above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye

during a tour, July 13, 1798’ when he writes:

….And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting sunsAnd the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky and in the mind of man:

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A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. [1798] (Wordsworth,

1973, p.164)

‘Something’ is ‘deeply interfused’, and Wordsworth gleans

that this something is in fact the source that impels all

other things. Interfusion in this instance offers an

intimation of connection, of a web being held together by

this common, informing impulse that inhabits the ‘mind of

man’ as well as the ocean, the air, the sky. It is

interesting to ask whether or not Wordsworth, in being

able to name this experience of interfusion, has risen

above it in order to be able to see it, and whether this

has had the effect of distancing him from it in some way.

This is reminiscent of how a scientist might once have

looked through a microscope and named his discovery

without realising that he himself was a part of what was

being looked at.

Whilst I am not suggesting that Wordsworth did not

feel himself to be interfused with these things, I am

suggesting that his poetry evidences a separation between

the observer and that which is observed. This can also

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be seen in further lines about interfusion from The Prelude,

where he writes:

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:Along his infant veins are interfusedThe gravitation and the filial bondOf nature that connect him with the world. [1805]

(Wordsworth, 1978, p.27)

Here Wordsworth tells us that the blood in the child’s

veins is interfused with the ‘filial bond of nature’ and

that this bond connects him to the world. As a result,

the child cannot be an outcast because separation cannot

exist when nature is as deeply rooted inside of us as it

is in the world outside. Again, though, Wordsworth tells

us this by naming the connection, and in doing so

suggests a distance between the interfused infant and

himself. Whilst this does not diminish the

insightfulness of Wordworth’s vision, I wish to further

explore interfusion as something that can be written

through as opposed to written about.

It is useful to consider some of the origins of the

idea of interfusion whose earliest sources can be found

in Taoist thinking. In Creativity and Taoism, the fifth

century thinker, Chuang Tzu, relates an inner experience

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of interfusion of subject and object through the

following story:

Once I dreamt that I was a butterfly, fluttering here and there; in all ways a butterfly. I enjoyed my freedom as a butterfly, not knowing that I was Chou. Suddenly I awoke and was surprised to be myself again. Now, how can I tell whether I was a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly, or whether Iam a butterfly who dreams that she is a man? […] This is called interfusion of things. (cited in Chung-yuan, 1975, p.20)

This story not only encourages us to ask whether it is

possible to distinguish between subject and object, but

also inches us into a landscape where certainty becomes

obsolete, for it is no longer relevant to locate a source

of agency in any one place. This is thrilling, confusing

and enticing, particularly if we are accustomed to

adhering to established ways of thinking that depend upon

being able to ascertain the difference between dream and

waking. It also introduces the reader to an

exceptionally basic understanding of Tao, a belief system

that is concerned with unifying all things. Tao is:

the primordial source of every beginning and every end. It is the realm from which all birth issues forth and to which all death returns. It is all embracing, far reaching, never ceasing, yet it is the realm of the unknown; so it is called nonbeing. (Chung-yuan, 1975, p.35)

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These complex ideas are rooted in a culture that is

radically different to my own, and yet it is useful to

expand the exploration of interfusion by examining the

source from which they come. Interfusion seeks to define

an experience of life that is concerned with wholeness:

instead of getting caught up in dualistic opposition, it

creates an approach that embraces all things, even when

these things are diametrically opposed to one another.

Chung-yuan writes:

In this unity everything breaks through the shell ofitself and interfuses with every other thing. Each identifies with every other. The one is many and themany is one […] Each individual merges into every other individual. Here we have entered the realm of nonbeing. The dissolution of self and the interfusion among all individuals, which takes placeupon entry into this realm of nonbeing, constitute the metaphysical structure of sympathy.

(Chung-yuan, 1975, p.36/7)

There are links here with Rumi’s ‘many beings in one

being’ (Rumi, 1995, p.278), and also Elson’s ability to

feel the ‘itch of evolution’ in a way that precludes any

separation between an individual and all the evolving

individuals who have shaped her being. It is also worth

briefly comparing ‘the metaphysical structure of

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sympathy’ with the way in which Western mystics referred

to ‘Love’. The sixteenth century mystic, Jacob Boehme,

spoke of love in the following way:

Love is higher than the highest, greater than the greatest, and whoever ‘finds it, finds nothing and all things’ – ‘nothing’ because love is so incomprehensible and so much deeper than everything that nothing can be compared to it: it is an ineffable mystery. Yet the discoverer of love also finds ‘all things’ because love is the beginning andthe end of everything – ‘all things’ are ‘from it, and in it, and by it’. (Harper, 2005, p.146)

In this passage, love is akin to the Taoist understand of

nonbeing, with everything being from it and in it and by

it. A more contemporary explication of interfusion, that

is specifically related to the act and experience of

writing, can be found in the work of Hélène Cixous:

All that I can say is that this “coming” to languageis a fusion, a flowing into fusion; if there is “intervention” on my part, it’s in a sort of “position”, of activity – passive, as if I were inciting myself: “Let yourself go, let the writing flow, let yourself steep; bathe, relax, become the river, let everything go, open up, unwind, open the floodgates, let yourself roll . . . ” A practice of the greatest passivity. At once a vocation and a technique. This mode of passivity is our way – really an active way – of getting to know things by letting ourselves be known by them. You don’t seek to master. To demonstrate, explain, grasp. And then to lock away in a strongbox. To pocket a part of theriches of the world. But rather to transmit: to make

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things loved by making them known. (Cixous, 1991, pp.56/7)

This passage contains what I believe to be the richly

paradoxical root of writing. Cixous talks of a passivity

that is active and of ‘getting to know things by letting

ourselves be known by them’. She attributes life to the

thing itself and suggests that writing arises when the

poet is able to open herself to this. She also

positively rejects the idea of being in control: the

writer is not concerned with mastering and owning but

with finding a language that will enable her to

‘transmit’ the essence that arises from fusion.

It is one thing to be able to discuss this process,

and to name it as Wordsworth has named it, but is it

possible to find examples of poetry where interfusion

informs the writing itself? An indication of the need to

do this can be found in the following by D.H. Lawrence:

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths,

love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock

molten, yet dense and permanent. (Lawrence, 1932, p.69)

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Lawrence exhorts us to move beyond the simile of love

being ‘like’ grass and into the full blown experience of

metaphor where the heart now becomes rock that is molten

and permanent. This, surely, is the interfused vision,

the one where person and earth have become unified and

through this process have discovered that they share the

same composition, even if the fabric of that composition

is different.

The work of the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, takes us

into the vortex of interfused experience. His poem ‘ÁRBOL

ADENTRO’ (A TREE WITHIN)

begins:

Creció en mi frente un árbol,Creció hacia dentro. (Paz, 1988, p.114)

(A tree grew inside my head.A tree grew in.) (trns. Weinberger, 1988, p.115)

There is no explaining, no use of simile, no likening a

thought in his head to a tree. The tree is inside of the

poet’s head: the body of the human being and the body of

the tree are one. The poem continues with the poet

saying that ‘its roots are veins’ (ibid) and that the

glance of another is capable of setting it on fire. Dawn

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exists within the night of the body and when it breaks,

the tree speaks. The poem concludes:

Allá adentro, en mi frente,el árbol habla.

Acércate, ¿lo oyes? (ibid)

(There, within, inside my head,the tree speaks.

Come closer – can you hear it?) (ibid)

The tree has been microscoped into the frame of a person.

Macro and micro are fused, inner and outer are fused,

human nature and earth nature are fused. No one thing is

like another; instead, they are one another, distinct and

distinctly indistinguishable. I suggest that this makes

it extremely difficult to categorise the poem as a

‘nature’ or ‘landscape’ poem because it goes beyond the

traditional understanding of writing about nature and

instead, I argue, the poet writes as nature. The

conventional understanding of what is inside and what is

outside has been blown apart and instead we are given a

poem whose deceptively simple evocation belies a

generosity of spirit that cannot be boundaried by

rational perception.

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There is an interesting development of this poem by

Paz in the work of contemporary Mexican poet, Jorge

Esquinca25. In his poem CASA DE SALUD (Sanatorium), he

shows how fusion between a human being and a tree signals

a return to health. The body as tree signifies a

recovery, just as Prager identified intimate experience

as having beneficial effects on health at the beginning

of this chapter. Esquinca writes:

Estira sus ramas que relumbran como un pensamiento, mira hacia abajo para estrenar la nueva altura de sutronco. Hunde con firmeza los pies en la tierra recién regada y un calido vapor toca su frente. Hoy como nunca puede sentir la circulatión misteriosa dela savia. En el bolsillo de su camisa duerme un pájaro. (Esquinca, 2004, p.245)

He stretches his branches and they sparkle like thoughts – looking down he tries on the new height of his trunk for the first time. He plunges his feetin newly watered ground and warm steam touches his brow. Today, like no other, he feels the mysterious circulation of sap. A bird is sleeping in his shirt pocket. (Esquinca, 2008, p.36)

The patient’s blood has become sap, his feet are plunged

in newly watered ground – this is an ecology of the human

body taken to an extreme of fusion where there is no

differentiating between the body of tree and the body of

25 I have been translating Esquinca’s work for the past three years. Five of his poems are included in the portfolio (pp. 190-195) and Jorge Esquinca’s biography can be found in Appendix 2 (p. 197).

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human. In The Plumed Serpent, by D.H. Lawrence, the Mexican

character, Ramon, says the following to Kate, an English

woman:

“They pull you down! Mexico pulls you down, the people pull you down like a great weight! But it may be they pull you down as the earth’s pull of gravitation does, that you can balance on your feet. Maybe they draw you down as the earth draws down the roots of a tree, so that it may be clinched deep in soil. Men are still part of the Tree of Life, and the roots go down to the centre of the earth […] It may be you need to be drawn down, down, till you send roots into the deep places again. Then you can send up the sap and the leaves back to the sky, later.”

(Lawrence, 1981, p.87)

For further examples of interfusion I return to the

poetry of Paz. In ‘LA CASA DE LA MIRADA’ (‘THE HOUSE OF

GLANCES’) we are taken on a journey ‘inside yourself’ where

the murmur of blood travels through ‘unknown territory’

and where you voyage ‘between the infinity outside and

your own infinity’. Listen to the following lines:

al entrar en ti mismo no sales del mundo, hay ríosy volcanes en tu

cuerpo, planetas y hormigas, en tu sangre navegan imperios, turbinas, bibliotecas, jardines, también hay animales, plantas, seres de otros mundos, las galaxias cirulan

en tus neuronas (Paz, 1988, p.110)

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(entering yourself you’re not leaving the world, there are rivers and

volcanoes inside your body, planets and ants, empires, turbines, libraries, gardens sail throughyour blood, there are animals, plants, beings from other worlds, galaxies wheel

through your neurons) (trns. Weinberger, 1988, p.111).

This kaleidoscopic vision opens a door and allows us to

walk into a landscape that can only be known in the

process of its creation. Whatever is without is also

within and, as Paz himself asserts, we create in order to

see. In relation to the idea of geographical intimacy,

we are now entering a terrain that is so unbounded it is

no longer possible to speak of external locations as

places that are outside of us. There is no attempt to

situate the human being in relation to their environment

because they are that environment. It is simply no

longer possible to achieve separation of one from the

other.26 I am particularly entranced by Paz’s poetry

because he excludes nothing: if ‘The House of Glances’

offers us an insight into nature, then that nature is 26 This idea of relationality is explored by John Wylie in Landscape, where he writes: “Rather than relations and connections being forged in an already-given space, relations are being viewed as creative of spaces….This relational view of a world-always-in-the-making owes muchof its derivation to a set of arguments called actor-network-theory.”(Wylie, 2007, p.200)

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wholly inclusive. It is impure, in the way that Neruda

argues for impurity, and is wholly inclusive, in the way

that Snyder sees nature as including everything upon this

planet. The need to divide something man-made from

something that is natural has completely disappeared and,

instead, we are given a world that is equally occupied by

ants and turbines and libraries and animals and plants27.

This absence of division is explored in Creativity:

Theory, History, Practice, in a passage that examines the

creation myths of Aboriginal people in Australia.

Speaking of the dream-time, which is the story of the

earth’s creation, an Aboriginal elder asserts that

creation is not something that happened once upon a time

but something that keeps on happening. The Earth’s

creation is a process, is something that is continually

in process, and as an inhabitant of the earth the elder

is necessarily involved in this process:

this is not an activity which simply takes place regardless of humanity, in some free-standing time and space. Rather, the very recital by the speaker

27 In Don Paterson’s book of aphorisms he writes the following, which openly challenges our way of categorising natural things and is reminiscent of Snyder’s assertion that everything is natural: ‘From the cloud to the zip-fastener, the silver birch to the dirty bomb, everything arose – and so must be considered a member of the set of natural objects.’ (Paterson, 2008, p.104)

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of the histories and figures that identify this particular place is itself an activity that both recognises and re-creates the landscape: ‘Through the singing we keep everything alive; / through the songs the spirits keep us alive.’ This is speech that acts and is acted upon: created, it creates in return.

(Pope, 2005, p.144)

In this way, everything and everyone is responsible for

living and for making life. There is an awareness of

continual exchange and this is, perhaps, as a result of

the intimacy that is experienced between the individual

and their environment.

The language of metaphor in poetry is perhaps the

most apposite way of expressing interfusion because it

has the capacity to synthesize and embody radically

opposing elements and ideas without needing recourse to

rational argument or any sense of justification. In

Volume 1, Chapter 22 of Poetics, Aristotle considered

metaphor to be something that ‘cannot be acquired from

someone else, and (b) is an indication of genius’ [59a6]

(Aristotle, 1987, p.32) in a poet, because it points to

the poet’s ability to see resemblances. A metaphor fuses

together two separate things, it makes them intimate in a

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way that dissolves any sense of distance between them.

In this sense it is ideally suited to embracing

diametrically opposed ideas and allowing them to co-exist

in a unified way. This is not the case in expositional

prose and the struggles of the physicist, Neils Bohr,

bear testament to this. In his studies of quantum

physics, Bohr discovered that atoms and particles are not

fixed or independent, but trying to explain this involved

using language in a way that required him to speak of

‘duration, position, location, independent existence,

intrinsic properties, forces, interactions and so on’

(Peat, 2007, p.67). He felt that this contaminated the

integrity of his work and so he adopted the practice of

writing in a contradictory manner:

He often said that the opposite of a truth is falsehood. But the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. Thus when he had written a sentence in one of his papers he would try to contradict it with the next sentence! (ibid).

Perhaps Bohr would have enjoyed experimenting with

expressing his scientific findings in poetry, or perhaps

this is what he was moving towards as he strove to find

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an elasticity of prosaic language that could adequately

represent his ideas.

Returning to Paz, I like to imagine the contribution

that he might have made if he, too, had been present at

the conference that Kathleen Jamie attended on writers

and the environment. Instead of an environment limited

to ‘primroses and dolphins’ he might have injected a

wholly different, and no doubt effervescent critique that

would have been spacious enough to embrace the recent

death of Jamie’s mother as a part of the environment they

were occupying in that moment. There would have been

room for the polar bears, the grief, the eyes that could

look beyond the obvious external things and begin

tunnelling inside in order to see, in the darkness of the

human body as well as the Earth’s body, that which they

were trying to talk about.

In ‘PARAJE’, (‘PLACE’), Paz follows a road with no

name where each step is a ‘legend from geology’ that

becomes lost in time. The road carries the sun on its

back whilst the sky piles distances over the brevity of

reality. The poem ends,

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La hora se detienepara verse pasar entre unas piedras.El camino no acaba de llegar. (Paz, 1988, p.102)

(The hour pauses to watch itself pass between a few stones.

The road never stops arriving.) (trns. Weinberger, 1988, p.103)

These lines echo Cixous’ idea of the writer who passively

opens herself in order to ‘know things by letting

ourselves be known by them’. There is no seeking to

explain or master the ‘place’ in the poem, rather there

is an ineffable sense of things informing the poet of

their existence. The hour observes itself through its

movement between stones, the road never ceases to arrive

and, because Paz refers to the ‘legend’ of geology, he

liberates science from empirical fact and instead

identifies it as part of an ongoing story. It is also

interesting to consider Paz’s poem in the light of

Hooker’s notion of the ‘deep channel’, the one that the

poet enters by crossing a threshold. Whilst I concur

with Hooker’s concept, I am also inclined to suggest that

in Paz’s work no such crossing occurs because he is

forever inside that channel and the channel is, equally,

forever inside of him.

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To delve further into this suggestion it is helpful

to briefly consider Paz’s poem about poetry, ‘PROEMA’,

(‘PROEM’). He writes:

A veces las poesía es el vértigo de los cuerpos y elvértigo de la dicha y

el vértigo de las muerte; el paseo con los ojos cerrados al borde del

despeñadero (Paz, 1988, p.2)

(At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and

the vertigo of death; the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the

cliff)(trns. Weinberger,

1988, p.3).

This vertiginous experiencing of poetry is borne out in

Paz’s work where we are able to see an intelligence that

is courageous enough to let itself go and be taken into

regions than can only be seen with ‘closed eyes’. Paz

implies that the walk of the poet is a dangerous one, for

to walk on the edge of a cliff without looking where you

are going requires an inimitable trust. This element of

danger, and the fear that it can evoke, is central to the

poet’s work and I will return to it in more detail later.

In this poem, Paz also speaks of language as:

las migraciones de miríadas de verbos, alas y garras, semillas y manos;

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los substantivos óseos y llenos de raíces, plantadosen las ondulaciounes

del lenguaje;el amor a lo nunca visto y el amor a lo nunca oido y

el amor a lo nuncadicho: el amor al amor. (ibid)

(the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;

the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;

the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in

love.) (ibid)

Language itself is rooted in all the things of the earth

and it migrates as seeds migrate. Nouns are embodied in

bones; they are full of roots and, here again, we have

love, the ‘love in love’. For me, the poetry of Octavio

Paz exemplifies a geographical intimacy with all things:

people, nature, buildings, death, love, animals, plants,

and this intimacy renders a world where language,

experience, place and nature are ultimately inseparable,

or to put it another way, interfused. The creation of

language itself is embedded in the land; it comes from

the land, is co-created with the land. As Jorge Luis

Borges noted, language:

evolved through time, through a long time, by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders. It did not come from the libraries; it came from the

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fields, from the sea, from rivers, from night, from the dawn. (Borges, 2000, p.81)

If we are in accord with this then it becomes necessary

to imagine and embrace the taste of the earth in our

mouths when we speak, the feel of the earth in our

fingers when we write. Intimacy with our environment is

a given: we stray from this awareness at our peril.

To return to the courage needed for interfusion to

occur, and the fear that often accompanies it, I would

like to consider a short passage from The Living Mountain by

Nan Shepherd. Shepherd spent forty years of her life

living by, and walking in the Cairngorm mountains in

Scotland. In her short and exceptionally eloquent book

she seeks to know ‘essential nature’ (Shepherd, 2008,

p.1), ‘to know, that is, with the knowledge that is a

process of living’ (ibid). She goes on to say that this

knowledge is not acquired easily or quickly, ‘it is a

tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of

immediate enough import for its desperate problems’

(ibid). If Shepherd forges an intimate relationship with

the mountains, and there is no doubt that she does, then

it is sobering to receive her counsel and to realise that

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the problems we currently face cannot be swiftly

remedied. Further to this, she touches upon the fear she

experiences in bringing together knowledge and language.

She writes:

To apprehend things – walking on a hill, seeing the light change, the mist, the dark, being aware, usingthe whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit – yesthat is the secret life one has and knows that others have. But to be able to share it, in and through words – this is what frightens me….it dissolves one’s being. (Shepherd, 2008, p.xii)

This dissolution of being characterises the poet’s

process, and in this instance the writer’s process, and

is the consequence of opening up to the active passivity

that Cixous spoke of. All sense of self disappears in

the moment of writing and this disappearance is precisely

the thing that allows fusion to occur. In this way the

poet who experiences fusion, or inter-fusion, can be said

to undergo a metaphorical death because all conscious

knowledge of being dissolves. The poet ceases to be in

control and instead experiences something that is beyond

‘being’. This journey into the beyond place allows us to

gather, or be informed by new insights that we then bring

back and offer to the world.

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This fear of using language can also be found in the

experience of Eskimo poets28. In Eskimo, the word ‘to

make poetry’ is the word ‘to breathe; both are

derivatives of anerca – the soul, that which is eternal:

the breath of life’ (Carpenter, 1973, p.50). The Eskimo

Orpingalik says:

And then it will happen that we, who always think weare small, will feel still smaller. And we will fearto use words. But it will happen that the words we need will come of themselves. (Carpenter, 1973, p.51)

When the words come of themselves, a poem is born. To

some, this may appear easy but the courage required to

let go of all control and allow the self to dissolve

cannot be understated. To know language as an active and

creative force can be terrifying. To be willing to open

oneself up and receive, rather than impose, words asks

for unlimited trust and a willingness to undergo an

erasure of self. This is also my experience as a poet,

28 The cultural geographer John Wylie has observed that ‘to argue thatnon-Western peoples, in particular indigenous peoples, live their lives through a perception of the world which is more authentic and natural than that of the contemporary West is to project onto such peoples a latter-day version of the romantic fantasies of Arcadian innocence and oneness with nature which characterised many colonial and imperial representations of non-European others.’ (Wylie, 2007, p.183) Whilst I heed this observation, it is my task in this thesis to identify a communality, rather than a difference, of experience between Western and non-Western peoples in the process of writing.

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for there have been many times when the act of writing

has incurred a fundamental destabilisation of the ground

of my being which inevitably leads me to ask who am I,

and who wrote those words that have appeared on the page?

When interfusion occurs, we are taken into the heart of

the generative process and all possibilities are set

alight.

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Conclusion: Choreographies of The Tongue

Recognising fluency in language, landscape and the human body through themedium of air.

Although living close to the sea in Hartland has been

significant to my work and my thinking, it is vital to

include in this thesis the specific landscape of my

childhood, which has influenced, and continues to

influence the whole of my life. When I was two years old

my parents moved to Street in Somerset. Street is just

under three miles away from Glastonbury Tor and it is

this place, more than any other, that I consider to be

home; not home in the sense of where I live, but home in

the sense of where I am rooted. The Tor is my omphalous;

it is a part of a landscape that I have been intimately

connected with for more than forty years.

In May of this year, I met a man as I was making my

way to the base of the Tor. We enjoyed a brief

conversation about the weather and apple blossom.

Referring to the top of the Tor, the man said to me, “One

is inevitably turned inside out up there”. He was

referring to the fact that no matter how still the day,

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when you reach the Tor’s peak there is often a wind so

strong, so ferocious, that it destabilises the

uprightness of a standing body and forces you to adopt a

stance or way of moving that is created in direct

correlation to the speed and strength of the gale. In

this sense, it is no longer possible to simply be a human

being moving through a landscape. Instead, you become

something, a body, a fraction of bone and muscle, that

moves and dances with the elemental force of air. This

air not only surrounds you but also enters you through

the continual action of breathing. You become, briefly,

instinctively, something that integrates and collaborates

with the land and the land’s weather. You become a part

of the fluency of place.

In relation to this, I recently wrote the following

notes in my journal:

the choreography of the tongue, the tongue as a linkbetween land and brain – air as a bridge – the tongue shaping the land into a word – or rather, theair caressing the tongue into a particular shape or movement, then activating the voice box and giving rise to speech – because the air we breathe influences inflection – mother land, mother tongue, the choreography of tongues that are wedded to particular topographies29.

29 This is an extract from an unpublished journal.

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The shape of our language, our dialect, is directly

influenced by the shapes of the landscape where we live.

Learning to speak the Queen’s English eradicates these

regional variations, but left to its own devices the

tongue, in collaboration with the brain and heart, will

create a musicality of language that is directly and

intimately related to a particular geographical location.

Fluency and relatedness can be traced all the way

down to the cellular level of our bodies. As John

Gribbin notes in his book, Stardust:

We are made of stardust. Every atom of every elementin your body except for hydrogen has been manufactured inside stars, scattered across the Universe in great stellar explosions, and recycled to become part of you.

(Gribbin, 2001, p.1)

The elements that compose my body are the same elements

that compose the body of the Earth and the body of the

Universe. However, I suggest that actual experiences of

fluency have become obscured, partly as a result of our

perceived notion of separation. We do not like to think

of ourselves as something that is recycled in the same

way that worms, dust and dead bodies are recycled, and

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yet this is precisely the nature of our life. The brief

spark of our own skin-encapsulated existence is nothing

other than a momentary opportunity for carbon, hydrogen,

oxygen and nitrogen to come together in a particular

form. The form may be distinct, but our substance has

been forged in the great energetic cauldron that gives

rise to the circumstances that permit life to exist upon

Earth.

To be turned inside out, then, to quote the phrase

used by the man that I met when climbing the Tor, is to

undergo a transformation and to briefly know oneself as

something that is a part of everything else. If we

accept that we absorb and take in the things around us,

then being present in a strong wind gives us the feeling

that this process can happen the other way around as

well, that the things inside us can be outside of us.

This can best be understood in the action of breathing:

systole and diastole. I take air into my lungs; my lungs

replenish my blood with oxygen and then expel air that

contains carbon back into the atmosphere. When we think

about this, we realise that breathing constitutes a

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perpetual chord between ourselves and everything around

us. Awareness of breathing leads to an awareness of

connection, which also reminds us of the significance of

the oral traditions of poetry. Again, Chief Seathl

expresses this idea in his testament:

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share

the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man, theyall share

the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice

the air he breathes. (Seathl, 1994)

This takes us back to the words of John Dewey in the

Introduction, where he stated that our ignorance of the

connection between ourselves and our environment was due

to it being more intimate than the air we breathe (Dewey,

1925, p.246).

If I expand the consideration of what I take inside

my body, then I must include everything that I have seen

and experienced. In turn, it follows that the things I

give to the world through my body, through the actions of

breathing, walking, defecating, talking, are coloured by

my feelings, thoughts and the minutiae of my internal

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cartographies. The anthropologist Tim Ingold

encapsulates this idea when he writes:

To feel the wind is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to mingle with them. In this mingling, as we live and breathe, the wind, light, and moisture of the sky bind with the substances of the earth in the continual forging of a way through the tangle of life-lines that comprisethe land. (Ingold, 2007, p.S19)

Ingold makes a crucial distinction here between making

contact with and mingling with. In order to make

contact, there needs to be two separate entities.

Mingling, however, suggests that the boundaries between

these entities are porous and that each party involved

gives something to the other by being actively engaged in

a process of exchange. With this in mind, it might be

worth asking whether or not the question I opened this

thesis with, namely how do we connect with the land,

needs to be rephrased. Would it be more accurate to ask,

‘How do we mingle with the land?’. This evokes a very

different feeling, one that is slightly uncomfortable and

slightly confusing because I find myself unable to fall

back upon preconceived ideas.

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Ingold goes on to say that in the open world ‘there

are no insides and outsides, only comings and goings’

(Ingold, 2007, p.S31). Refusing to accept the

conventions of the boundaried and fixed being or thing,

he asserts that:

inhabiting the open does not yield an experience of embodiment, as though life could be incorporated or wrapped up within a solid bodily matrix. Nor does ityield an experience of disembodiment, of a spirituality altogether removed from the material fluxes of the world. To feel the wind and breathe the air is rather to ride on the wave of the world’songoing formation – to be forever present at the ‘continued birth’, as Merleau-Ponty called it, of other persons and things. It is as though every breath was one’s first, drawn at the very moment when the world is about to disclose itself for what it is. In this, it is not so much the wind that is embodied as the body, in breathing, that is enwinded.(Ingold, 2007, pp.S31-2)

Being turned inside out on Glastonbury Tor was, for me, a

moment when I could ‘ride on the wave of the world’s

ongoing formation’ and thus also the formation of

‘persons and things’. This wave was not fixed or

contained, rather it was in a continual process of

relationship, creationship and exchange. To experience

this is exhilarating and enhances a sense of what being

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alive can be, the extent of it, the zing of it, the

mystery of it.

Whilst it is not possible to perpetually inhabit the

epiphanic moment, we can

revisit it in and through poetry. Poetry, as an ancient

craft, was concerned with capturing the magic, as Robert

Graves notes in The White Goddess:

European poetic lore, is, indeed, ultimately based on magical principles, the rudiments of which formeda close religious secret for centuries but which were at last garbled, discredited and forgotten. Nowit is only by rare accidents of spiritual regressionthat poets make their lines magically potent in the ancient sense. (Graves, 1961, p.17)

One of the finest examples of this can be found in the

work of the fifth century Welsh poet and seer, Taliesin.

Taliesin was replete with mystical awareness and he

claimed to have been present at some of the most crucial

events in the history of the world. This is not to say

that he was actually present in the way that we

understand presence within a chronological framework, but

rather that he was able to move through time, that he was

able to transport himself to what we might better

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understand as other times. As he writes in ‘The Song of

Taliesin’:

I have beenFrom the beginning.I have seenAll manner of things. (Taliesin, 1991, p.13)

In order to develop an understanding of fluency and

inside-outness, I wish to consider two poems by Taliesin.

The first, ‘The Unicorn’, situates the poet on a green

hill where he can see a unicorn ‘Through narrowed eyes’

(Matthews, 1991, p.55). Being familiar with each other’s

strengths and weaknesses holds the animal and the poet

fast to one another and through this binding the

following takes place:

Then, for a heartbeat poet and beast were fused,Man-unicorn, white-maned and horned.Then each was back in our own flesh,Having borrowed something of the other. (ibid)

Through this process of fusion, they are able to ‘borrow

something’ from each other. Whilst Taliesin does not say

what was borrowed, I believe that he reveals an ancient

element of the poet’s craft, namely the ability to

mingle, or fuse, with another being. It is precisely

this ability that allows him to know the world not as an

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on-looker or as someone who is separate, but as someone

who is intimately connected and conversant with the

substance of other things. I suggest that this mingling

occurs as a result of being able to experience one’s

outer shell as porous rather than impermeable, and to

enter an abandonment of self that leads to a moment where

we are conjoined with something we previously perceived

as being other than ourselves. In effect, we turn inside

out: something outside enters us as we, in turn, enter

them.

The second poem I wish to look at is ‘Taliesin and

the Tree’. The poem begins:

Time out of mind I watched the tree –In less than a moment entered its heart. (Taliesin,

1991, p.103)

Here again, then, Taliesin enters another thing. The key

instruction in this poem is contained in the first four

words where he locates himself in a time space that is

outwith the mind. Outside the conventional experience of

time, the poet is able to travel not only through space,

but also through matter. In this poem, we are given a

fuller view of what he borrows from the process of

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entering the tree’s heart. He dreams through the

seasons, feels summer fade, sees the sun burn and the

moon conquer. When he has ‘learned all I might’ (ibid)

he goes away singing and in response ‘the tree mourned my

song’ (ibid). Taliesin thus situates learning as

something that results from immersion in the heart of the

tree. The tree teaches him about treeness and the

suggestion that the tree mourns his absence when he

leaves, implicitly signifies the intimacy of the

relationship that they have achieved with one another.

Unlike Molloy’s poem in the Chapter 1, it is

important to note that the poet here does not lose his

human nature in these experiences. In fact, it is

essential that he retains it in order for a mutual

exchange to occur. This is a paradoxical assertion

because the poet is at once able to dissolve into the

being of another without losing anything of himself. The

result is an enrichment of self and a learning that could

not have occurred within the confines of a solely human

experience. As he says in ‘Taliesin’s Creed’,

I am in the stoneI am in the wood

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I am in the sunI am in the dancingI am in all things – (Taliesin, 1991, p.31)

Thus, the individual is not lost in other things but

rather finds his ‘freedom’, ‘strength’ and ‘self’ in

them.

Taliesin’s poems satisfy all of the features we have

so far identified as being a part of geographical

intimacy and yet I do not think it is possible to call

these poems ‘nature poems’ or ‘ecopoems’ without

obscuring the deep, transformational aspects of his

poet’s craft. Perhaps they can be called natural poems,

poems that have arisen from the poet’s awareness of the

fluidity of his own nature in relation to the fluid

nature of everything else that constitutes the world.

This world includes trees, mythical creatures, the dead

and events that happened before he was born. More than a

world, Taliesin inhabits a universe that is not tethered

to rational understanding but rather one that is

imaginatively and experientially open. It is, perhaps,

not a universe that most people know, but it is one that

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a poet can know and write about30. The poet can raid this

experience and return to us whatever he has found.

In the introduction to The White Goddess, Robert Graves

contemplates the question, ‘What is the use or function

of poetry nowadays?’ (Graves, 1961, p.14). He reasons

that neither the use, nor the function have changed

because poetry continues to invoke the muse and to

expound upon the exultation and horror that ‘her presence

excites’ (ibid). What has been lost, however, is the

application of poetry. He writes:

This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of thelady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. (ibid)

Graves clearly advocates what he understands to be the

danger of ignoring poetic truth and the resultant

disharmony ‘with the family of living creatures’.

30 In ‘The Old Monk Complains’, I write: ‘Take one single drop of what you can see / and become it. Become bee, stone, cloud.’ And later: ‘As with love you must be blind, entertaining / your small mind to allow the greater force / to come streaming through. / But be warned – this is a deadly way / for only those prepared to die / will receive the gifts of a seer’s eye.’ (p. 154)

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The dishonouring that Graves refers to is evident in

the poem, ‘A Blade of Grass’, by Brian Patten. Patten

writes:

You ask for a poem.I offer you a blade of grass.You say it is not good enough.You ask for a poem. (Booth, 1983, p.96)

This first stanza superficially identifies the difference

between the way in which a poet views a poem and the way

in which a reader views a poem. To the poet, a blade of

grass is a poem: to the reader, the blade of grass is a

blade of grass and not a poem. There is a conflict of

perception, a dissonance that betrays irreconcilable

sensitivities.

The poem continues:

You are indignant.You say it is too easy to offer grass.It is absurd.Anyone can offer a blade of grass. (Booth, 1983,

p.97)

Patten shows how the expectation of what a poem should be

inhibits the acceptance of what the poet has to offer.

There is a clash between the idea of poetry and the

poet’s understanding of a poem. The blade of grass

becomes more difficult to offer and, ‘as you grow older’,

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more difficult to accept. Patten says he is writing ‘a

tragedy’ about how difficult it has become to offer a

blade of grass which makes this poem less a musing upon

grass than upon the calcification of perception. The

‘tragedy’, then, infers a loss of interactive

sensitivity, which inhibits not only an appreciation of

grass but also of the poem and the poet’s craft.

The umbilical chord that connects a poet to the

Earth is forged in the cauldron of imagination. The

imagination is itself a place, a geographical terrain, an

intimate location that encompasses the dead, the moon,

the worm, dung, gravity, astronomy, turbines, motorcars,

love, people, hills, varnish, language, rivers,

buildings, bombs – in short, all of the things that we

share this planet with. With the term ‘geographical

intimacy’, I have highlighted the limitations of

categorising an environment as rural or urban, natural or

unnatural, inside or outside, and have suggested that by

acquainting ourselves with intimacy – love, trust,

partner cohesiveness, mutual sharing – we are able to

enter into relationship with our landscapes in a way that

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opens up new and more enlivened connections. I suggest

that if we truly desire to heal the separation between

human beings and the land then it may be useful to cease

confining poems to convenient boxes and focus upon the

complexities of meaning and process instead. This may

enable us to challenge the schism between a human being

and the totality of her evolution, her environment, her

political and social context. In July 2009 I wrote in my

journal that:

I want to win for poetry a place that is unencumbered by the more traditional ideas of ‘nature writing’. A poet writes poems, the subject matter varies, but what unequivocally remains is therelationship between the poet, language and place, wherever that place may be. It is the quality of connecting natures, the nature of the poet and the nature of place that remains constant.31

In order to conceive a more expansive way of

contextualising poetry, I have explored poetry within a

framework of geographical intimacy. I have conducted

these explorations as a writing, researching poet who is

immersed in her work and her place of residence. Any

settled ideas of landscape that may have inhabited my

imagination before moving to Hartland have been eroded by

31 This is an extract from my unpublished journal.

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living in such close and intimate proximity with extremes

of weather and an environment that is constantly

changing. The land here is shaped by wind, by waves, by

people, by tractors, by fertilisers, by buzzards. I,

too, am shaped by all of these things. My teachers

include farmers, rocks, the insistent growth of thrift

and vernal squill, the deviance of lambs who are taught

by their mothers to breach the fence and seek the grass

beyond their allotted field. Vincent Van Gogh once wrote

to his brother, Theo:

And yet to see the country, you must live with the poor people and in the little homes and public houses etc. [1889] (Van Gogh, 1963, p.325)

For six years I have been learning to see the country in

a way that is radically different to the knowledge of

country that I possessed when I lived in the city and

visited the country. My relationship with the natural

world and with my natural self has ceased to be an idea:

it has become inevitable, intimate, necessary.

The desire to be free of the more traditional

notions of being a writer or artist of nature is

expressed by the painter, Per Kirkby, when he writes:

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But I am a modern painter. I paint pictures and not landscapes. I will not allow myself to be infected by this nice, clean image as the painter of nature.

(Borchardt-Hume, p146,2009)

If we translate this text into one that might have been

written by a poet, then we would read the following, “But

I am a modern poet. I write poems and not landscapes. I

will not allow myself to be infected by this nice, clean

image as the poet of nature.” This is precisely what I

am seeking to suggest. As a poet, I argue that the

modernity of my work pushes against categorisation and

the boundaries that come with this. Like Kirkby, I do

not wish to be ‘infected’ with a clean image, and nor do

I wish ‘nature’ to be corralled into some semblance of

niceness. This is why Neruda postulated the idea of an

‘impure’ poetry, why Rimbaud argued for a ‘de-schooling

of the senses’32, why Jamie felt such intense frustration

at the writers and environment conference, a frustration

that drove her away from dolphins and primroses and into 32 Rimbaud introduced the idea that we need to de-school the senses inorder to achieve an ‘unwounded perception’ that allows everything to appear as it it, that’s to say, ‘infinite’. He argued that we need to reinvigorate language and move beyond gentility: “It is not so much that we must ‘make strange’ as to be prepared to find life as strange as it is, and it is a function of gentility to conceal strangeness.” (Redgrove, 1991, p.21)

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the microscopic terrain of the diseased flesh of a

cadaver.

Perhaps, when we really feel ourselves to be

integral and integrated parts of our landscapes, we will

cease to invent divisions and instead read all poetry

simply as poetry and achieve a deeper understanding of

the ‘reach’, as Berger referred to it, of a poem. We may

even decide to abandon the idea of nature because the

idea itself ‘maintains an aesthetic distance between us

and them, us and it, us and “over there”’ (Morton, 2007,

p.204). Then, instead of continuing to defining poems as

nature poems, or ecopoems, or landscape poems, poems can

be simply poems because, as Wordsworth wrote, ‘Thy Art be

Nature’ [1842] (Wordsworth, 1973, p.220). If we are able

to unhitch ourselves from ideas of how things should be,

or could be, we might appreciate the varied impurity of

things as they are instead because:

Poetry makes things real, restoring their life and our perception of it.

(Murray, 1984, p.175)

Perhaps it is this reality that we need to adhere to for

now, the realness of the poem and the realness of the

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thing. In this way we might begin to restore life to

things and to refresh our own perceptions. We may even

begin to love the Earth for its own sake – not to save it

from destruction, but from a deep awareness of the value

of life. The ideological framework of geographical

intimacy, as explored in this thesis, will hopefully take

us closer to this goal.

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Creative Writing Portfolio:

Future Geographies

or

la, la, la

or

The Singing that Joins Us to this Rock

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Introduction

I have divided the Introduction to the portfolio into

three sections. The first considers the title of the

portfolio and the way in which this came about. The

second section chronicles the circumstances that led to

the writing of the poems and the relationship between the

writing and the environment in which I live. The third

section places the portfolio within a contemporary poetic

context and asks what comes next.

Part I: The Title

The decision to have a title that see-saws between one

phrase and another arises from my own, personal

experiences of geographical intimacy. Living in a small,

North Devon village has taught me many things, not least

the endlessly variable natures of the Atlantic ocean, the

weather, the light, the fields and woods that surround

where I live. Constancy is evidenced in the coming and

going of the seasons, the repeated patterns that make up

a year, the return of light and the return of darkness,

but the greatest visual and auditory information is

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sourced in the wildly inconstant and unpredictable

relationships between the elements.

Geographical intimacy cannot be evidenced in any one

thing or with any one thing: it is a multiplicity of

relationships between people and the land, people and

people, the land and the weather, people and the weather,

animals and people, and so on. This multiplicity led to

the desire for a title that reflects a sense of

plurality, rather than singularity in my work. In

addition to this, I wanted a progressive title (a

waterfall of a title) that might in some way imply not

only the musicality of language but also the topography

of a human mind and a living landscape that cannot be

distilled into any one definite thing.

A title composed of three titles embodies this

variability and immediately creates a web of

relationships. Visually, and energetically, it resembles

the rocky cliffs that define the coastline near my home:

it also encapsulates different voices and different

registers of voice, which alert the reader to the

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contents of the book by creating what Cixous refers to

as:

an open, receptive, stretchable, tolerant, intelligent language, capable of hearing the voices of the other in its own body. (Cixous, 1996, p.5)

Each part of the title is equally important. The

first, ‘Future Geographies’ (p.173)33 comes from a poem in

the portfolio that questions and explores how we need to

change in response to the planet’s changing climate. The

second and third parts of the title, ‘la, la, la or The

Singing that Joins Us to this Rock’ (p.167) constitute

the title of a single poem that addresses our potential,

as human beings, to connect with the earth. This double

title also points to the two-fold nature of many things:

nature/nurture, conscious/unconscious,

analytical/creative, alive/dead, known/unknown, for

example. However, it was not enough to present these

oscillating dualities on their own as a title for the

portfolio because I wanted to suggest that it is possible

to move beyond oppositions as well as occupying them,

hence the inclusion of ‘Future Geographies’.

33 Please note that all page references for my poems refer to the portfolio of poems in this thesis.

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The multiple title, which can be read as a small

poem in itself, has a precedent in the novella, The Hour of

the Star, by Clarice Lisptector. Although there is only

one title on the cover of the book, the inside page

offers a vertical list of thirteen different titles.

These can be read as a very short story, or they can be

experienced as platforms that prepare the reader for the

insecure and shifting narratives that inhabit the text.

I felt an immediate resonance with Lispector’s daring

approach to naming her book, and the fact that she had

been brave enough to foreground a writer’s indecision on

the one hand, by not being able to choose a single title,

and creative decisiveness on the other, by opting to

include multiple titles. Here, then, was a writer whose

language embodied the fractured or multiple voices that

inhabit her.

Lispector is a Ukrainian-born, Brazilian writer and

early on in the book the narrator declares:

In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music […] This book is a silence, an interrogation. (Lispector, 1992, p.16/17)

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This passage contains several connections with my own

work: the importance of the body when writing, the

musicality of words, and the uncanny echo of Mackay

Brown’s ‘interrogation of silence’ (Brown, 1996, p.24),

which he identifies as the true task of the poet. In

addition to this, it felt appropriate to source a

precedent from a text that was not written in English

because this acknowledges the huge influence of writers

from other cultures upon my work. These influences began

over twenty years ago when I studied for my first degree

in Comparative Literature, which entailed surprisingly

little comparison but did expose me to a wealth of

translated literatures as well as English and French

literatures in the original. From the beginning, my

literary eye and ear has been attuned to writing from

other cultures: this roots my own practice in a global

spectrum of literature as well as enabling me to actively

appreciate different voices and ways of structuring and

expressing those voices in a text.

It was my intention, when naming this collection, to

step aside from the

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authorial dominance implied by a single, bold title. I

wanted to create an invitation to the book that was

intriguing and that offered the reader a chance to engage

on several different levels at once. ‘Future

Geographies’ implies a measured and precise approach to

what may come. ‘la, la, la’ is child-like, revelatory

and surprising. ‘La’ is the sixth note of the scale in

sol-fa notation (Chambers, 2006, p.834), it means ‘see!’

or ‘behold!’ or ‘indeed!’ (ibid), it also connects us

with the primacy of utterance and a vocabulary of

intuitive non-words. Sandwiched between the other two

titles, ‘la, la, la’ injects a degree of mystery by being

outwith the register of logical language, and in this

sense it destabilises and stabilises at the same time

(logic, after all, can only be known in relation to that

which is illogical). The final part of the title, ‘The

Singing that Joins Us to this Rock’ connects with the

Australian Aboriginal idea mentioned in the thesis, that

‘Through the singing we keep everything alive’ (Pope,

2000, p.144). It also concurs with experiments that have

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been carried out to discover the effect of sound waves

upon materials:

such a lycopodium powder (spores of club moss), vegetable pulps, iron filings, plastic, glycerine, and other liquids […] When the sound’s amplitude (loudness) is increased, turbulence and eruptions occur in these materials, showing movements eerily reminiscent of mountains being formed, waves breaking, or indeed, as Manners put it, “the Earth coming into existence”.

(Gardner, 1990, pp.120/1)

Singing joins us to other things because the sounds we

make literally change the world around us; it also

connects us with the oral traditions of poetry.

Part II: The Poems

I have developed a keen sense of the land as an

instructional companion since living in Hartland. The

rocks, the trees, the tides, the people, even the

buildings teach me about themselves and in response I

learn about myself in relation to them. In this sense,

living here informs me of the way in which relationality

itself creates existence, being and language. Wordsworth

says of a poet, ‘He hath put his heart to school’ [1842]

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(Wordsworth, 1971, p.220), and that this schooling

results in being able to understand the following:

Because the lovely little flower is freeDown to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;And so the grandeur of the Forest-treeComes not by casting in a formal mouldBut from its own divine vitality. (ibid)

Is it also possible, then, for a poet to be free down to

her roots, to be bold, and discover her own divine

vitality?

The daily habit of writing, which I refer to as

immersive practice, lies at the heart of this portfolio

and is the only constant factor that I am able to

identify in my work. My poems are supported by the

necessary practicalities that underpin this commitment: I

have a study in which to write and I work in the local

pub to ensure I have enough money to buy food and pay

rent. Apart from this, I put ‘my heart to school’ by

remaining as open as possible, practising, listening for

the arrival of a poem and walking with the intention of

being responsive to a landscape that surrounds, informs,

inhabits and supports me.

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In the last year of his life, Vincent Van Gogh made

the following observation to his brother Theo:

It is really my opinion more and more, as I said to Isaacson, that if you work diligently from nature without saying to yourself beforehand – “I want to do this or that,” if you work as if you were making a pair of shoes, without artistic preoccupations, you will not always do well, but the days you least anticipate it you find a subject which holds its ownwith the work of those who have gone before us. You learn to know a country which is fundamentally different from its appearance at first sight. [1889](Van Gogh, 1963, pp.329/30)

The ability to enter each day with the intention to work,

but without a specific need to know that ‘I want to do

this or that’, is my guiding principle. For every poem

that gains inclusion in the portfolio, there are at least

three or four others that have been evicted to the bin,

or ‘look at later’ folder. I have not always done well,

but I have always worked and this immersion in my

practise surprises, delights and infuriates me. In

short, my daily habits of walking and writing are helping

me to ‘learn to know’ the land where I live and to find

new depths, textures and rhythms of language.

The correlation between landscape and language is

particularly evident in ‘Indigo Sea’ (pp.137/8), ‘Lines’

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(p.184), ‘What We Do When We Stop Talking’ (p.175) and

‘Stroke’ (p.160). Prior to living in Hartland I had not

written poems with such variable structures: in these

lyrical poems there is no adherence to left alignment,

the words spread out across the page, the lines occupy

unpredictable territories. The choreography of the lines

is instinctive, created by the movement of my hand, the

pulse of my breath and the informing explosion of

synapses. What is important to consider is why I, as a

poet, have decided to leave these poems in this form

rather than editing them into more conventional shapes.

To answer this question I will look specifically at

the poem, ‘Stroke’. This poem evidences the way in which

I have given myself full permission to explore the edges

of my physical and emotional world as well as my

compositional methods. The cliffs at Hartland Quay

introduce me, physically and metaphorically, to the place

where one thing ends and another begins. They are tall

and strong but avalanches of rock are frequent, large

chunks of the coastal footpath often erode and collapse,

sheep fall off the cliff and bullet onto the rocks below.

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Recently a man drove his car off these cliffs: they are a

place where the line between life and death is always

visible. My mother’s stroke, like these cliffs, marked a

potentially fatal transition point and at the time of its

occurrence I felt emotionally shaken because nothing in

my world could be relied upon or taken for granted any

more:

Asthore,my darling,

you are split in two. One of youlies in a hospital bed

the other has fled to the stars. (ibid)

This poem poured itself onto the page: lyrical,

ambient and fluid. Several months after writing it,

however, I decided to rein it in by turning it into a

villanelle34. Whilst this new poem worked in its own

right, I no longer felt as if I had spoken truthfully

about the impact my mother’s stroke had upon our lives.

I wanted to show the fracture lines in the landscape of

my heart, my world, I wanted the terrible instability to

be fore-grounded and evident in the architecture of the

poem. Movement and an openness of form are evident

everywhere in my landscape and it is precisely this 34 Please see Appendix 3 (p.198)

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movement that comes to fruition in the poems that do not

align on the left. In this way the land and the elements

teach me to embody this aspect of being in my poetry.

The words are still within the sphere of the page, just

as the wind is always within the sphere of Earth’s

atmosphere, but they move in a way that relies upon an

internal coherence rather than any predictable

patterning. I wrote in my journal, ‘Stroke has its own

constellation of phrases, as if they were born from a sky

that already existed.’

Finally, I decided to stay with the original version

of ‘Stroke’. This decision is poetical, personal and

political: it is my way of affirming the nature of my

body, my language and my landscape in the moment of

writing. It is a decision to expose the vulnerability of

structure, to offer a poem that is visually

unpredictable, one that requires the reader to affix

instead to the internal rhythms, rhymes and

alliterations. With nothing to hold on to externally,

perhaps the reader has to find something of their own

vulnerable shifting nature to correspond with the poem,

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to achieve relational responses that may feel

uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Also, the following

comments by Denise Levertov helped to illuminate my

decision:

‘Open forms’ do not necessarily terminate inconclusively, but their degree of conclusion is – structurally, and thereby expressively – less pronounced, and partakes of the open quality of the whole. They do not, typically, imply a dogmatic certitude; whereas, under a surface, perhaps, of individual doubts, in the structure of the sonnet orthe heroic couplet bears witness to the certitudes of these forms’ respective epochs of origin. The forms more apt to express the sensibility of our ageare the exploratory, open ones. (Levertov, 1979, p.1)

Further to this, Levertov suggests that non-metrical

poetry is more able to reveal ‘the process of

thinking/feeling, feeling/thinking’ (ibid) which allows

the poet to explore ‘human experience’ in a different

way. She sums this up as being able to ‘present the

dynamics of perception along with its arrival at full

expression’ (Levertov, 1979, p.2).

‘Stroke’ has since been published by Agenda in its

original form and the editor, Patricia McCarthy, chose to

enter it for the Forward best poem of the year

competition.

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Instability in the landscape is also explored in

‘Blackpool Beach, Winter’ (p.162), but in this poem the

regularity of three-line stanzas act in tense opposition

to the sense of everything breaking down. Other poems

written in tercets are ‘Life Rock’ (p.158), ‘Leaving

Home’ (p.141) and ‘Here’ (p.143). These poems achieve

more, not less, by being written in tercets because their

formal structures are juxtaposed with a sense of shifting

(and sometimes stable) territory as we see in ‘Life

Rock’:

I am caught between the worlds.The worlds wash over me. I do not move, I disappear by fractions. (p.158)

I like the tightness of a tercet, the opportunity to end-

stop phrases and stanzas or to use enjambment and create

bridges between them. ‘Ram’ (p.155), ‘Trinity’ (p.136)

and ‘Night’ (p.145) are short, lucid observations written

in tercets, whereas ‘Conversation with a Pebble’ (p.132),

‘Derryclare Lough’ (p.129), ‘Everything Falls Away’

(p.170), ‘Earth Baby’ (p.156), ‘O Rain’ (p.163) and

‘Cannot Unsun’ (p.187) keep the same form but are more

exploratory. One of the advantages of working with

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tercets is the opportunity to play with the breathing

spaces between stanzas. These empty places offer an

additional pause and create connections that occur

through visual and rhythmic space as we see between ‘air

and ‘above’ in ‘Cannot Unsun’:

Cannot uncypress the treeextending long green branches

into the unknown territory of air

above the beach. (p.187)

Here we literally and imagistically have ‘air’ above the

beach and a chance for the reader’s eye to in habit this

space by floating from one tercet to the next.

Sometimes, editing a poem is like kneading bread. I

work with the original material until the necessary form

begins to push through. Occasionally I write poems that

need no work, but these are rare. Most of the time I

play with the words, phrases and images until a poem

blooms, takes shape and rises into the body of itself.

‘Transport’ (p.182), ‘Birling Gap’ (p.169) and ‘Living in

Hartland’ (p.176), also written in tercets, are all poems

that were kneaded until they arrived at their present

shape. I wonder if my inclination towards this form

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isn’t related to being able to play the piano. Each note

on the piano consists of three strings that resonate as

one – this trinity of sound has been reverberating in my

bones since I began playing the piano as a young child

and whilst the three lines in a poem do not produce the

same aural sound, they do cohere and resonate with one

another.

‘The Old Monk Complains’ (p.154) was initially

written in five stanzas of varying lengths, but in the

editing process I was able to achieve a more succinct

expression of the monk’s thoughts by bringing it into a

stricter form. In this way, the requirements of

regularly lined stanzas encourage me, as a poet, to be

more focussed and to cut out any extraneous words, or

digressive thoughts. This discipline is echoed in the

poem, when the monk describes the process of embodiment

that precedes the writing of a poem:

Just one drop of what I sawand I’d become it: stone, cloud, beekilling my small mind to let the greater force

come streaming through. (ibid)

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Monks recur in two other poems in the portfolio; ‘The

Monk and the Fuscia’ (p.140) and ‘Walking the Abbey Road’

(p.172). My affinity with monks stems from several

sources: many years ago I lived in an Abbey on the Isle

of Iona, which was originally built by monks; monks would

once have walked from the Abbey here in Hartland through

the paths in the Vale; every year monks from the Buddhist

retreat of Plum Village in France visit Hartland and

offer satsangs (opportunities to meditate with them).

The word Abbey, and all that it evokes, is etched into my

memory and my vocabulary and it exerts a lasting

influence upon the story of the land where I live. A

strong spiritual vein runs through my world, and I am

receptive to it:

To walk where monks once would have walkedto step where they too have steppedto press these lips to the same sea salted airto taste on a breeze lost fevers of their talk.

(p.172)

How are the poems in this portfolio written? What,

besides sitting down with paper and pen or pencil,

contributes to the creation of my work? As Louise Glück

observes in Proofs and Theories, writing is:

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the opportunity to experience, briefly, no division between self and work, to become, briefly, nothing that is not that work. (Glück, 1994, p.89)

I subordinate my ‘self’ when I am writing – which means

that even the phrase ‘when I am writing’ becomes somewhat

erroneous. ‘When writing is happening’ is probably a

more accurate way of describing the creative process in

the very first instance of a poem’s apparition upon the

page. ‘What We Do When We Stop Talking’ (p.175) offers

some insight into this process:

You think the rocks are certain?Look at them, they’re full of faults. You think that tree’s got it all mapped out?

Please.It’s bending under the weightof the wind and twisting back on itself

to find the light. (ibid)

There is a paradox at the core of my process: I am

committed to writing but I do not know, when I write, if

a poem is ready to be written. I can put words on a

page, play with language, practice writing a sonnet, but

the informing electric impulse that generates the best

poems is not something that can be summoned at will.

Like a tree I am ‘twisting back’ on myself ‘to find the

light’ – sometimes, I can return to a poem after more

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than a year has passed only to find that I am now ready

to finish it in the way it needs to be finished.

Each poem is blessed with its own particular needs

and heart beat: there is no formula that I can follow

except for the one that instructs me to turn up and do

the work day after day, week after week, equally mindful

of the fact that some faults enliven a poem whereas

others collapse it into a sequence of unsatisfactory

phrases. Denise Levertov makes the following, pertinent

comments about the difficulties of describing the process

of writing poetry:

In talking about the process, I’m almost obliged to say, “First you do this. Then you do that. Then you stand back. Then you do that.” But these things overlap and flow into each other. One has to use that linear description of a process that is actually much less linear, much more intuitive, doubling back on itself. (Levertov, 2004, p.3)

I am forever ‘doubling back’, turning around and trying

to adhere to that intuitive voice that is usually my best

guide.

‘Snow’ (p.124) originally concluded with a statement

rather than a question, ‘This is our swan song’. I

thought the poem was finished; after all, I was happy

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with the couplets and the way in which they spoke of the

connections between people and the land, people and

animals, but I couldn’t deny a nagging sense of something

being not quite right. The didacticism of the final line

annoyed me, but for a long while I wasn’t able to clearly

identify that this was where the problem lay. Finally it

occurred to me: the future is not a foregone conclusion

and the poem’s integrity is damaged if I suggest that it

is. I changed the last line into a question, ‘Is this

our swan song?’. Suddenly the poem came to life by

adhering to that which is unknown.

Other poems written in couplets include ‘Strike’

(p.125), ‘The Hare in the Moon’ (p.139), ‘Came Creeping’

(p.157), and ‘Voyages of Sand’ (p.171). This latter poem

is written in rhyming couplets because I wanted to evoke

a familiarity of language resembling a fairy tale. This

is congruent with the subject of the poem and the magical

idea of sand travelling around the world in the wind. I

was astonished when I first discovered that sand can not

only be swept away from a beach, but that it can travel

from the Sahara to our shores in the wind. These voyages

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of sand are extraordinary and I wanted to create a poem

that embellishes this sense of marvel by making it sound

child-like because it is usually children, rather than

adults, who appreciate the significance of tiny things.

I moved to Hartland in 2004 after accepting an offer

to be poet-in-residence in the Small School35. I knew

that two poets, Ronald Duncan and the Reverend Robert

Hawker, had both lived in villages nearby and written

poems in huts on the cliffs: Hawker’s Hut36 is hewn out of

the rock at Morwenstow and Duncan’s hut is a wooden shed

on the cliffs at Marsland. Although it was important to

know that I was moving to a place with a poetic

tradition, a coastline that had offered shelter and

inspiration to other poets, the poet who most influenced

my decision to live and work in this area was the

American writer Jack Gilbert. After winning prizes for

his first book, Gilbert turned his back on a glittering

career and headed for Europe where he spent most of his

time living in solitude or with a lover. When Gilbert’s

poetry entered my life I was stunned by the degree of

35 It was during the second year of this residency that I began my PhD.36 This is protected by the National Trust.

187

awareness and insight in his work. Here were poems that

were unlike anything else I had ever read: they plumbed

the depths of his soul, they were gritty, simple,

astonishingly honest and I resonated with them in a way

that made me want to see if I could stretch the

boundaries of my own work and encapsulate more of these

qualities in my poems. His writing acted like a magnet,

a dare, some kind of compass that encouraged me to step

out of the habits of my life in the city and embark upon

a different path in Hartland.

Gilbert writes in ‘Beyond Pleasure’ of poetry as

something that:

fishes us to find a worldpart by part, as the photograph interrupts the fluxto give us time to see each thing separate and enough.The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forwardto know its merit with attention. (Gilbert, 2005, p.75)

This, then, was the task: to interrupt the flux, to bring

attention to things and allow poetry to ‘fish’ me, to

actively enter into me, and find a world. Gilbert’s work

shows a remarkable ability to bring different, often

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opposing, things together. There is no clash between

urban and rural, factories and fields; instead, there is

an integrity at work that is intelligent enough to

embrace all of these things. I, too, want to create a

portfolio of poems that embodies the various elements of

my life as I am living it and remembering it: born into a

working class family, I need space in my writing where I

can include the factory where my father worked, ‘Clark’s

Shoe Factory’ (p.150) alongside poems that trace the

death of a stag, ‘Six Boys and a Stag’ (p.153), or the

ability to divine the future by reading cracks in burned

shoulder blades, ‘Omoplatoscopy’ (p.146). In this

regard, the politics of my writing is grounded in an

understanding of naturalness that includes my own human

nature and evolution as well as the nature of the place

where I am living.

Raymond Carver’s ‘Sunday Night’ counsels the poet to

‘Make use of the

things around you’ (Carver, 1990, p.87). He goes on to

exemplify this by including the rain, a Ferrari and a

drunken woman next door before concluding with ‘Put it

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all in, / Make use’ (ibid). This attitude of democracy

towards the potential content of a poem is liberating and

reminiscent of Neruda’s plea for a poetry that is impure

(cited in Bellit, 2005, p.39) and thus more real. This

is critical to my thinking: I want to write poems that

really see the things around me and within me without

attempting to prettify them or squeeze them into a

semblance of what might be considered as a ‘nature poem’

or a ‘landscape poem’.

Hartland is an extremely unusual place: it is not

accessible by train and there are no motorways or dual

carriageways that lead to it. We are ‘unvibrated’ by

rail and road traffic and for this reason the British

Geological Survey measures the movements of magnetic

north with equipment located on the edge of the village.

This peninsula juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and there

is nothing between here and America, hence the

observation of what people may be pointing at in ‘Smaller

than a Raindrop’:

I do not know what they see out there –a seal, a cormorant, a racing white horseor the beginnings of America. (p.177)

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Also, the cliffs at Hartland Quay are some of the highest

in the Southwest and they are like open books recounting

the story of the Earth:

At Hartland Quay two major types of rock, sandstonesand mudstones, have been folded to form some of the most spectacular coastal scenery and geology in North West Europe. Here we can investigate evidence of dramatic geological events that took place on theearth’s surface over 300 million years ago. (Childs, 1989, p.2)

An awareness of the earth’s changing nature generated

‘Huxman’s Close, South Devon’, a poem that explores the

slowness and speed of movement, from the ‘neighbour’s

bath water / stuttering through a pipe’ to stones that

‘hide in the slowness of time / and appear to go nowhere’

(p.147). ‘Here’ (p.143) arose from knowing that:

The continents of today are not fixed, but are embedded in areas of the Earth’s crust which drift around on the surface of the globe as ‘plates’ floating on the semi-molten mantle beneath the crust. When the rocks of Hartland Quay were laid down, this location was somewhere near the equator. (Childs, 1989, p.2)

In this poem, I liken the rocks of Hartland to whales

because I want to introduce the idea that this land is

breathing and moving. I also suggest that the crumbling

of our coastline is an unavoidable part of the land’s

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migration from one place to another and not necessarily

something that we can control or exert any lasting

influence upon. In this way, when the big picture and

the smaller details are brought together, the

significance of a human being shrinks and we see

ourselves as guests upon a planet where, in the words of

Chief Seathl, ‘The earth does not belong to man; man

belongs / to the earth. (Seathl, 1994).

The most significant shifts in my perception of

place, or learning ‘to know a country which is

fundamentally different from its appearance at first

sight’ as Van Gogh refers to it, arises from my decision

to walk every day and the unavoidable contact with the

elements that ensues from this. Prior to moving to

Hartland, I was living in Easton, an area of Bristol

where it was often unsafe to walk or cycle alone. This

led to an uncharacteristic and quotidian dose of fear

that coloured most of the journeys I made. In Hartland,

however, I feel safe enough to walk anywhere at any time:

this release of mental and physical energy is liberating

and undoubtedly contributes to the volume of poems that I

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am writing here. I practice walking in much the same way

as I practice writing – every day I go out, irrespective

of the weather, and walk to a destination, or simply roam

(which is often called getting lost) and I have been

known to walk the woods in the Vale at midnight in

complete darkness and without a torch37.

Walking every day has opened up a new awareness of

my environment, one that is literally and melodically

paced into the musculature of my body. This practice

fosters an increased sensitivity to the weather and

weather pressure38, and it allows a deeply embedded sense

of intimacy to develop over a long period of time. In a

recent article in New Scientist, ‘Let your body do the

thinking’, there is an acknowledged shift towards

accepting the importance of environment upon thinking

processes:

Research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts. (Ananthaswamy, 2010, p.8)

37 This is quite an invigorating practice and demands an alertness of the senses that is not required during day light.38 Peter Redgrove has conducted interesting studies into the intimate influences of weather and atmospheric pressure upon people. For an account of this please see The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense (p.78-93, Redgrove, 1987).

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‘Conversation’ (p.180) evidences this visceral aptitude

for being in contact with the land by offering a glimpse

of an evolving language of the body, a wordless

vocabulary that creates a physical dialogue with the land

and a collaboratively made journey:

just looking on, wonderingat the conversation between feet and road,skin and sun, eye and stone and tree. (p.185)

‘Dark Matter’ (p.161), ‘Transparencies’ (p.134) ‘Moon

Lamb’ (p.148) and ‘Moon’ (p.139) also witness the webbed

matrix of connections between the body, mind and

environment.

‘Hawk’ (p.128) arose unexpectedly after watching a

bird of prey above a field one day when I was walking

near Cheristow. What interested me in this poem was the

way in which I seemed to be getting inside of the hawk’s

hawkness, rummaging around in there in order to find

something that might not have been said before. This

came in the lines:

Not the cry but the arc – part round, partstraight line – sounds the song of flight. Notthe noise of it but the drive inside that noise –

(ibid).

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I felt, when I looked at what I had written, as if I had

touched upon something invisible that was fuelling the

bird and its ability to hunt. The form of the poem

echoes the form that Gilbert always uses – a block of

lines with no breaks, the emphasis being upon line

endings and acuity of observation. I enjoy writing in

this way because it encourages me to thoroughly plumb the

argument, or idea, behind the poem. There are no

technical distractions or frills to distract and in many

ways I consider this form to be more arduous to achieve

than a sonnet or villanelle, for instance. Other poems

written in this way include ‘End of the Track’ (p.135),

‘The Library Bone’ (p.142), ‘The Village, Argentina’

(p.144), ‘Love Poem for a Shoe’ (p.164), ‘Eucalyptus’

(p.168), ‘The History Makers’ (p.174), ‘Undifferentiated’

(p.183) and ‘Raw Lizard’ (p.186).

Writing arises from giving my whole, admiring

attention to the fields, people, farmers, tractors,

silage, guns and primroses, clouds and rocks that share

this place where I live, as well as to the cities that I

visit when I go away from here. This action creates the

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foundation for what Berger describes as the poem’s

ability to bring ‘together-into-intimacy […] every act

and noun and event and perspective to which the poem

refers’ (Berger, 2001, p.451). ‘The Not-So-Clean Slate’

(p.159) and ‘Thoughts on Love’ (p.152) are love poems for

human beings, but in order to fully transpose intimacy

from the human realm into the realm of place, I have also

written love poems for the land.

‘Hartland Quay Cliffs’ (p.127) is an example of a

love poem for the earth. Neruda’s love poetry (Neruda,

2004) influenced the writing of this poem because the

expansiveness of his poetic reach gave me permission to

not only acknowledge the intense love I feel for the

nature of my landscape, but to press this love into

words. ‘Hartland Quay Cliffs’, then, was born from

experiences of swimming in the sea at Hartland Quay,

especially in the early morning when I swim naked if no-

one else is around:

Morning sea is different, quieter, less looked at bygulls and people, less travelled over by boats. It is like something just born out of the darkness of its night and the water feels different, more alive.To slip into this water when the sun is inching overthe cliff, to be naked in the water when those

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cliffs are reflected in it, to feel the pull of my body through water that contains their image is extraordinary.39

I often swim out for a mile or so across the bay, my body

embedded in the rise and fall of waves, the inward and

outward sway of the tide. During these swims I

experience an intimacy akin to the most intimate contact

between myself and a lover – sometimes we merge and I

forget who I am; at other times, we achieve pleasure

through distance and an appreciation of the ways in which

we are distinct. When I swim, I literally fall in love

with the sea and the cliffs and the experience of being

alive in water.

The first line of each stanza shows the contact that

is made between us, for example: ‘I arrive and the arms

of the cliffs encircle me’, ‘I swim out to sea and they

watch me’, ‘I sleep on sand and they dream me’. The next

three lines in each stanza refer to what is given to me

by the cliffs, who in this instance are the ‘other’ that

Cixous referred to earlier. In this way the poem is a

testimony to the sharing of that which is personal, one

of the prerequisites of intimacy, and it allows the 39 This is an excerpt from an unpublished journal.

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cliffs to deliver their evolutionary histories into my

body. The poem ends with a return to the place before

language, where there is a ‘howl, croak, hiss’ and

finally a ‘kiss’. This pre-verbal sound making connects

with the ideas expressed in ‘la, la, la or The Singing

that Connects Us to this Rock’ (p.167), where the brain’s

ability to remember its primitive, reptilian self

(Sweeney, 2009, p.69) connects us sonically with the

land.

I often hear myself telling people I live in a

‘remote place’. After a while, though, I begin to ask,

do I feel remote when I am here? When I am in Hartland,

I am here and here is the centre of my world. When I am

here, London is remote, but I do not imagine that there

might be one person in London who would ever say, I come

from a remote place called London. Language, or at least

our use of it, is skewed towards particular geographical

places and cities in particular. ‘Unremote’ (p.179) is a

response to this, a way of saying that ‘remoteness’

depends upon where you are looking from, and what you are

looking at. Our perceptions are limited and we need to

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be extremely vigilant if we wish to avoid falling into

linguistic traps:

Listen: the middle of nowhereis forever somewhere. (ibid)

Poetic slippages into the territory of ‘un’, which can be

viewed as the non-place, the one that is less considered,

also appears in ‘Cannot Unsun’ (p.187) and

‘Undifferentiated’ (p.183). In these poems I am playing

with, and questioning, the dominant modes of perception

by foregrounding the shadow side and re-connecting the

defined and qualified place with its twin, the one that

is ‘other’. Being attuned to this otherness is vital to

my use of language because, as Cixous writes:

writers who are conscious are guardians not only of the res publica, the common wealth, which is only one aspect of their work, but above all – it is their role, it is their mission – they are the guardians of language that is to say of the richness of language, of its freedom, of its strangeness, its strangerness.

(Cixous, 1996, p.5)

I wonder why ‘suburban’ has no ‘subrural’ equivalent

and why rurality occupies an imaginatively marginal place

in language and in our psyches. Why does

psychogeography, as a discipline, only consider the

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relationships between people and their environment in an

urban context? Is ‘geographical intimacy’ broad enough

to leap-frog over the limitations imposed by the

urban/rural schism that proliferates throughout our

culture, or is it a stepping-stone to an even more

inclusive terminology? The more I explore geographical

intimacy the more I am inclined to develop an elasticity

of language that honours the ‘richness’ and ‘strangeness’

of experience and perception. For instance,

‘forbiddener’ in ‘Moon Lamb’ (p.148), or the warped

progression of time in the final stanza of ‘Derryclare

Lough’:

He remembered a songhe’d never heard beforeand began to sing. (p.129)

The ideological framework of geographical intimacy

encourages me to research my relationships with the land

in a way that is not problem-based, but focussed upon

developing an aware and open matrix of connections.

Although I am aware of environmental damage and

degradation, it is not my task to devise messages of

salvation. Rather, I do my work in the hope that it will

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make an important contribution to the current debates

about nature, landscape and the environment. This hope

is aligned with Vaclav Havel’s understanding of hope,

which is succinctly different from optimism. Heaney sums

up Havel’s definition in the following way:

It is a state of the soul rather than a response to the evidence. It is not the expectation that things will turn out successfully but the conviction that something is worth working for, however it turns out. (Heaney, 2002, p.47)

The state of my soul affects my potential for connecting

with the land, with people, with birds and trees and

stones. In short, it is key to achieving intimacy with

my environment. I believe that awareness of the nature

of connectivity is so fundamental to living that it is

worth working for, and the way in which I work for this

is by writing poems. As Gilbert states:

poetry does make things happen – finally. I believe poetry deals with life. With my life. That it gives me my life more fully, and that it helps me in the direction in which I must proceed. (Gilbert, 1979, p.133)

Whilst some poems in this collection focus primarily

upon the outer landscape, for instance ‘The Village,

Devon’ (p.130), ‘The Red Rose’ (p.181) and ‘Suddenly

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Everything’ (p.178), other poems are sourced more

directly from within. Heaney describes such poetry as

poetry that is not:

a reactive response to some stimulus in the world out there. Instead it is a spurt of abundance from asource within and it spills over to irrigate the world beyond the self. (Heaney, 2002, p.143)

‘You’ (p.133) is an example of this ‘spurt of abundance’

from within, a poem that sources itself in the mysterious

arrival of love. It traces the thread of a meeting back

through the centuries, linking the people who came before

the lovers with the land that they inhabited, for this is

a love that could not exist without the grandmothers, the

badgers, the secret growth of a seed, the happenstance of

a meeting:

If I think of the seed, then I’d sayour meeting was conceived a long time ago.It was etched into a parabola of snow.It was sand in a camel’s hoof.It was in the scent of a badgeras one of our great-great-grandmotherswalked home late at night (ibid).

‘You’ ‘gives me my life more fully’, as Gilbert suggests,

because it threads together seemingly disparate moments

and events without diminishing the mystery of how this

happens.

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‘Genesis’ (p.126), also the result of an idea

welling up from within, examines the origins of the Earth

and explores the idea that it arose playfully. The

rarefied bubble of atmosphere that we inhabit is in a

continual process of creation and this creation includes

destruction. The final lines, ‘the dream excluded /

nothing, not even the things that might kill it’, implies

that there is always a choice, always a fine line between

constructive and destructive behaviours. This suggests

that we need to know our own natures and plumb the depths

of our motivations and desires in order to be aware of

their consequences. Cixous argues:

relations of power, of oppression, enslaving, exploitation – all of this begins within me: first of all in the family and in the interior of myself. Tyrants, despots, dictators, capitalism, all that forms the visible political space for us is only thevisible and theatrical, photographable projection ofthe Self-with-against-the-other. I suggest we add the preposition “withagainst” to the English language. The equivalent in French being: “contre”. I cannot even imagine how one could think otherwise.(Cixous, 1996, p.4)

Separation from the land reflects a separation from Self

– this interior landscape is where the work needs to

begin, where the ‘other’ needs to be welcomed and

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accommodated. In this sense, it is vitally important to

be aware of, and conversant with the ways in which we

interact with the landscape of our imaginations as well

as the landscape of our environment.

Resistance to this kind of thinking came to the fore

in the wake of a programme that BBC Radio 4 commissioned

about my public art project with poetry and stones40.

This is an international project that involves siting a

stone, with the words ‘And stones moved silently across

the world’ carved into it, in a public space. The

programme chronicled41 a journey that I made to Koonawarra

in Australia, and the negotiations that I undertook there

with a public arts officer, local people and workmen who

helped to site the stone in a public park. The BBC chose

to release the programme as a part of their Nature series

and in addition to a huge amount of positive responses,

there was also an expression of indignation from several

vocal listeners who did not think a ‘human story’ should

have been included in the Nature slot. The head of the

40 For more information about this work please refer to my website: www.thestonelibrary.com41 I was lent recording equipment by the BBC and created an audio-diary. These recordings constituted the biggest part of the programme, which was produced by Sarah Blunt.

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Natural History unit was subsequently invited to defend

the decision to do so on Right to Reply, which he did by

saying that the programme, Migrating Stones (Blunt, 2009),

evidenced the relationship between people and nature, and

the importance of achieving a passionate connection

between the two.

As an arts programme, Migrating Stones might not have

caused a disturbance, but as a ‘Nature’ programme it

dared to upset preconceived ideas of naturalness by

transgressing a deeply held notion of what nature must

be: i.e. something other than human.

In ‘A Robin Came In To See Me’ (p.165) I was

surprised to discover a robin in my house one morning.

Strangely, I had been sitting at my desk in my study

imagining a kitchen full of wild birds just minutes

before this happened. It felt right to kneel in front of

the robin and to devote my whole attention to whatever

was going on between us. I was not anticipating an

experience of interfusion, although this is the only name

I can give to what occurred next:

we stayedlike that – a trap of our making –

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exchanging strangeness

until we spilled into something else –another place

where neither knewwho either was – (ibid).

This connects my work with the work of Taliesin and

places me in a lineage of poets who opened themselves to

the more magical and shamanic aspects of the craft. My

surprise is conveyed in a narrative that is full of

dashes; these pauses allow the story to flit, like the

bird, and they also establish as much space as possible

within the landscape of the words. This space is needed

for the experience to be believed, received and responded

to.

Death and the dead are recurring themes in my work.

‘Walking The Abbey Road’ (p.172) and ‘A Worker’s Song’

(p.188) were both composed when I was walking in the Vale

in Hartland, and both reference the significance of

people who were once here but are no longer. Because I

had no pen or paper with me, both of these poems were

composed and remembered by heart. ‘A Worker’s Song’ uses

repetition in the first three couplets to create an

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incantatory sound, and its lyricism continues in the

final three couplets with a rhyme scheme that extends

between the couplets. It also connects with the title of

the portfolio and emphasises the way in which singing

joins us with other things and other people:

the singing you have heardis a rock, a heron, a vein of sap

lullabies from the deadthat I carry on my back. (p.188)

Often, I experience a sense of the lingering presence of

the dead, an intimation of the ways in which they

continue to inform the land I live and walk upon. In

many ways I consider the dead to be my collaborators when

I write, my co-creators, my companions. This experience

of the ‘other’ began when I was very young, perhaps two

or three years old, when I used to pass many hours in the

company of my dead brothers, all of whom had been

miscarried before I was born. The painter, Paul Klee,

positions himself in the following way with regard to

beings who are disembodied: ‘my dwelling place is as much

among the dead as the yet unborn’ (Klee, cited in

Partsch, 1990, p.7).

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This illuminates the affinity I felt for Mexico when

I visited my friend Penelope Downes, a painter, in

Guadalajara at the time of the celebrations of The Day of

the Dead in 2007. In Mexico I found myself in a country

with a culture that opens its arms to Death: Death the

character, the trickster, the one who cannot be avoided.

I revelled in the experience of being in a country that

had no regard for English institutions or English class

systems. In ‘Raw Lizard’ (p.186) I quote from Lawrence’s

The Plumed Serpent, using this as a springboard for

exploring an idea of kinship that is alien to the ‘white

individual’. Lawrence’s quotation continues with the

following:

Kate was of a proud old family. She had been broughtup with the English-Germanic idea of the intrinsic superiority of the hereditary aristocrat. Her blood was different from the common blood, another, finer fluid.

But in Mexico, none of this. Her criada Juana, the aguagdor who carried the water, the boatman who rowed her on the lake, all looked at her with one look in their eyes. The blood is one blood. In the blood you and I are undifferentiated. (Lawrence, 1981, p.433)

Mexico is a place where I no longer feel the need to

explain who I am, where I come from, or why death and

dreams play such a significant part in my life. Instead,

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I find myself being welcomed and accepted and, in turn, I

experience a sense of intellectual and imaginative

homecoming.

The city of Guadalajara is architecturally,

emotionally and intellectually different from any English

cities and these differences find their way into several

of the poems in this portfolio. In ‘Sueño’ (p.149) there

is no distinguishing between dream and reality; in

‘Teotichlan’ (p.151) we enter a world of heat, iguanas,

wild mustang, a strangely collaborative space where the

mysteriousness of agency is highlighted by the repeated

‘Companions, I do not know if we chose that day / or if

the day chose us’. In ‘The Hare in the Moon’ (p.131)

people see a wild animal in the moon rather than the

English habit of putting a man up there. This small

difference is huge: with a symbol of fertility presiding

over the night, all manner of other things are possible.

In ‘Guadalajara’ (p.166) it is impossible to draw a

firm line between private and public, inside and outside,

because the centre of Penny’s house has no roof; it is

open to the skies and when it rains, it rains indoors as

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well as outdoors. This architectural practice is common

in public buildings too, and at first it is

disorientating, strange and unusual. Julian Cope offers

an interesting angle on the symbolic difference between a

roofed and unroofed building:

It is ironic that the architects of the great medieval cathedrals such as Winchester and Chartres went to such lengths to design the illusion of transcendence into their creations, when it could have been achieved far more cheaply and spectacularly simply by creating a temple which was open to the heavens. For the roofing of a temple is far more than just a psychological disservice to Humanity – it is actually closing off the heavens, the cosmic part of the human psyche which endeavoursto ‘reach for the stars’.

(Cope, 1998,p.11)

In Penny’s house I feel as if the connection with the

heavens is immediate and domestic, elemental in the heart

of daily life.

I am indebted to Penelope Downes for introducing me

to Jorge Esquinca, a poet who is widely published and

celebrated in Mexico. Esquinca loved my work and not

only gathered a team of fellow poets to translate ten of

my poems42, but also set up a reading in Guadalajara with

42 These poems were later published in husocrítico (Lopez et al, 2009, pp.19-25).

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interviews on the radio and in the press. I and my new-

found Mexican colleagues worked into the early hours of

many mornings, drinking beer and discussing how to

translate certain words, ideas and phrases. We wrestled

with our respective languages, we fought, sought

arbitration, laughed and delved into the musculature of

each other’s imaginations. This process endorses the

following statement by Daniel Weissbort, co-founder of

the Poetry Translation Centre in Britain:

translation, as a mediation between cultures that requires total attention to primary utterances, and reciprocity rather than subservience, is a model forthe traffic between nations. (Weissbort, 2002, p.7)

After I returned to the UK, I began translating

Esquinca’s work with a colleague, Mercedes Nùñez. I am

honoured to be able to include these translations43 in

this PhD, as it enables me to show the lines of

continuance between Esquinca and Octavio Paz, and to

introduce Esquinca’s work to a wider audience. In

addition, there are many thematic echoes between my

poetry and Esquinca’s poetry, including the aliveness of

the stone in ‘The Water and the Stone’ (p.190) and the

43 Please see Appendix 4 (p. 199) for Jorge Esquinca’s permission to include these poems.

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poet’s visionary awareness in ‘The Hunter’s Tale’

(pp.193/4).

Part III: Context and What Comes Next?

At the moment, there is undoubtedly a renewed interest in

writing that is about landscape and nature, and the BBC’s

commissioning of Migrating Stones highlights this. My work

with stones exemplifies the way in which I am committed

not only to writing poetry but also to embodying poems

and words in the landscape. Having poems carved into

stones renders language three-dimensional: in this way I

lift words from the page and invite them to materially

inhabit open spaces. This practice encourages people to

read poetry in public places and it allows language to

act as a dynamic and informing part of the environments

in which we live. This work places me in the company of

poets such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sue Hubbard, and

broadens my practice to include considerations of visual

and physical representation.

In addition to the poets whose work I have used in

this PhD, it is important to acknowledge the influence of

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other poets and artists who are, or have been, working in

a similar vein, namely Robin Robertson, John Burnside,

Derek Jarman, Alice Walker, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino,

Sharon Olds, Richard Long, John Cage, Rose Flint, James

Harpur and also Fiona Sampson for her positive

encouragement and inclusion of work by poets from other

countries and cultures in Poetry Review. Several important

anthologies that specifically address our relationship

with the earth have also been produced over the past

decade, and they continue to be vital sources of argument

and enrichment: Earth Songs, edited by Peter Abbs, The

Thunder Mutters, edited by Alice Oswald and Earth Shattering,

edited by Neil Astley.

Much of my poetry, perhaps, can be situated within

the context of ‘ecopoetry’ which, as Neil Astley observes

in the introduction to Earth Shattering, ‘has only recently

entered the literary critical vocabulary’ (Astley, 2007,

p.16). As such, this term resists strict definition and

is rather in a process of attempting to understand and

explore the myriad aspects of poetry that respond to the

environment. However, I prefer my work not to be

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categorised and for the emphasis to remain upon the

immersive practice of writing, irrespective of the poem’s

subject matter. I am continually exploring the

precarious balance between all things: cities, cars,

planes, art, factories, trees, guns and primroses, rather

than attempting to convey a message. I do not write

ecopoems, I write poems44. Perhaps the two are not

mutually exclusive, though, and perhaps I can be in

context and out of context at the same time. In this way

I see the thesis and portfolio as contributions to the

critical and creative debates that are currently taking

place as well as being tools of witness to the poetic

modes of thinking, living and writing that form the core

of my process.

Over the next couple of years it will be interesting

to monitor the extent to which we are culturally ready to

be challenged about the way we see and respond to various

landscapes and our relationships with them. Ian Hamilton

Finlay provocatively suggests:

44 As Joseph Milne notes, ‘Thinking is to contemplate in awe and wonder. Classifying is not.’ (Milne, 2002, p.40) He goes on to identify the way in which labels distort by turning questions into theories.

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The world must be romanticized. Only thus willwe rediscover its original meaning. (Finlay, 2002, p.52)

If there are original meanings to be discovered, then

perhaps we also have to reconsider Wordsworth’s

observations about how the individual mind ‘to the

external/world is fitted’ [1814] (cited in Astley, 2007,

p.32) and how, also, ‘The external world is fitted to the

mind’ (ibid). We may need to expand upon these ideas and

think about the collective mind, as opposed to the

individual one, and also to consider how the body, as

well as the mind, is fitted to the world. Progressing

these questions is the task not only of poetry, but also

of physics, biology, anthropology, music, art – all

disciplines are involved in creating an understanding of

what it means to be alive and how to live fully. What

comes next depends upon the work we make and that future

is, as Jack Gilbert writes in ‘Resume’:

A future inch by inch, rock by rock,by the green wheat and the ripe wheat later.

(Gilbert, 2005, p.12)

At least twenty five of the poems in this collection

have already been published in contemporary journals and

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magazines. Numerous others are currently being

considered for publication in the UK and USA. Given that

Peterloo Poets, the publisher of my first volume of

poetry, no longer exists, I will shortly be sending this

portfolio as a manuscript to other publishers.

My vision for the future of the ideas and

explorations that form the core of this thesis has been

shaped by a fortuitous meeting. During the writing of

this PhD, I was invited by my friend, the artist and

fellow PhD student, Annie Lovejoy, to be poet-in-

residence in her Caravanserai project45 on the Roseland

Peninsula in Cornwall. Annie introduced me to Professor

Catherine Brace, one of her supervisors, and this led to

a surprising suggestion some months later. After reading

my book of poems, The Stone Library, Professor Brace

approached me and asked if I would consider being a poet-

in-residence in the Exeter University’s Geography

Department that is based in Falmouth. We applied for,

and secured, Leverhulme funding for this post which will

begin in September 2010. This will be the first time in

the U.K. that a poet has been resident in a geography 45 Please see the bibliography for the URL of this project.

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department. I will continue to explore the key features

of geographical intimacy and the relationships between

poetry and place within this context.

I remain committed, in my life and my work, to

engendering experiences that focus upon connecting with,

and being sensitive to the land and all of the creatures

and things that inhabit it. To this end I hope, as Havel

defines hope, that my work makes an important and lively

contribution to the life of poetry, the lives of people

and the life of this planet called Earth.

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Please note that most of the poems written for the PhD have been published and can now be boughtin book form.

The book is called Suddenly Everything

It can be bought from the publisher, Poetry Salzburg, or direct from me: alysonhallett99@gmail.com

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Appendix 1

Writing Exercise

This exercise will take place outside. You do not need to take anything with you but I suggest you wear clothingappropriate to the weather if you so wish. You will needto take a watch or a clock with you. Please read throughall of the instructions before beginning.

1. When you have at least 30 minutes to dedicate to this exercise please begin by preparing to go outdoors. Make sure you will be warm enough and that you will be able toroughly gauge when ten minutes has passed.

2. When you go outdoors, it is important that you do not know where you are going to end up. At this point, you need to know that you will step outside and allow yourself to be drawn to a location. There may be severalways in which you will be aware of this: the attraction to turn left or right may be prompted by something you can see, or something you can hear. It is also possible that you will just feel your body turning in a particulardirection without there being any obvious rational reasonfor this. Please decide now that you are going to followthe sense of attraction or the turning of your body when you step outside. In this way your body will be your tool of navigation as it starts to establish a responsiveattitude to the things around it.

3. Once you have moved towards the place where you will stay for ten minutes – or once this place has announced itself to you as a space that you are invited to occupy –then know that you will spend ten minutes here engaged inobserving. You will not write anything down and you willnot move around. It is important to be still and to follow your gaze, your ears, your nose, in short to follow your senses and to be able to receive the information they relay back to you. Pay particular attention to the materiality of things and do not get lost in abstract thinking. Keep on coming back to what is there, not what can be thought about.

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4. After you have done this for ten minutes, you will return indoors and spend the next twenty minutes writing.In the first instance be sure to retrieve as many detailsas you possibly can of things that you saw, heard, smelt,felt, tasted. Memories, metaphors and images may creep in, but the aim is not to generate them at this point. The aim is to attune to the things around you and to sharpen powers of observation.

5. When you have read through these instructions you are welcome to begin the exercise. I suggest that you start with a few minutes of conscious breathing as a way of clearing the mind. This can be done by sitting upon a chair, closing your eyes, and focussing upon the breath entering and leaving your body through your nostrils.

6. It may be appropriate to repeat this exercise several times a month. The senses love to have a good work out because it is invigorating and the benefits accrue over time.

7. Warning: If you are doing this in a highly populated area please be aware that other people might find your behaviour somewhat strange and even disturbing. One of my students was approached by a complete stranger who wascertain something must be terribly wrong – otherwise why would a human being simply stop and stare at the world around her?

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Appendix 2

Jorge Esquinca’s biography:

Born in Mexico in 1957. Amongst others, he has publishedthe following collections: Alliance of kingdoms (FCE,1988);The thistle of the voice (Joaquin Mortiz, 1991), for which hereceived Mexico’s National Prize for PoetryAguascalientes; Island of reunited hands (Aldus, 1997); Path ofthe stag (FCE, 1998); Vena cava (Era, 2002), Uccello (Bonobos,2005). Recently, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma deMéxico (UNAM) published his complete works, Region 1982-2002. His translation into Spanish of The compass flower byW.S. Merwin won the National Prize for PoetryTranslation. He has also translated the books of HenriMichaux, Andre du Bouchet and Alain Borer, Maurice deGuerin. He has been awarded a grant from the Ministry ofCulture in France and is currently a member of Mexico’sNational system for Creativity and the Arts. In 2009Jorge won the "Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía JaimeSabines para obra publicada" award. This is a new awardfor the best book of poems published in Latin America andSpain.

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Appendix 3

Stroke

There was light, she says, a soft blue lightand then nothing but darkness.When she saw the light she was not frightened.

Such an innocent word, stroke, one that mightimply nothing but tenderness.There was light, she says, a soft blue light.

Her right leg drags, heavy, disobedient. She fightsto walk, counts a single step a success.When she saw the light she was not frightened.

The rooms of her house have trebled in size,steps and doors are treacherous, complex.There was light, she says, a soft blue light

and in that light the gift of second sight.Strange to be suddenly blighted and blessed.When she saw the light she was not frightened.

Patience pulls her through the day, the night,the undoing of buttons when she undresses.There was light, she says, a soft blue light.When she saw the light she was not frightened.

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Appendix 4

Permission

Tuesday, 6 April, 2010 19:37From:

"jorge esquinca" <jorgeesquinca@hotmail.com>View contact details

To: "Alyson Hallett" <alyson_hallett@yahoo.co.uk>Dear Alyson, You have my full permission to publish the following poems in your thesis: El Agua Y La Piedra (The Water and the Stone), Casa de salud (Sanatorium), La Vaca (The Cow), Fabula Del Cazador (The Hunter's Tale), Prosa de Ines Camino al Cielo(Prose of St. Agnes' Path to Heaven). Yours sincerely,Jorge Esquinca

Soy como quiero ser en mi Messenger

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Appendix 5

DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY

Students are reminded that the work that they submit for assessment must be their own.

Please read the following statements and sign and date at the bottom of this form to show that you have complied:

1. This thesis and the work to which it refers are the results of your own efforts. Any ideas, data or text resulting from the work of others (whether published or unpublished) are fully identified as such within the work and attributed to the originator in the text,bibliography or footnotes.

2. This thesis has not been submitted in whole or in partfor any other academic degree or professional qualification at this or any other institution.

3. Any chapters that describe the outcomes of joint research should be clearly identified as such with a statement inserted as a footnote on the first page andcontributors named. Significant data, images or text resulting from the input of other researchers should be identified as such and attributed to the persons concerned by means of a footnote within the chapter.

4. It is usual to acknowledge the help and guidance of others who have assisted you during your research and preparation of your thesis. Such acknowledgements do not replace or obviate the need for individual attribution as discussed in points 1 and 3.

5. The University College reserves the right to submit electronic versions of your draft documents for assessment of plagiarism using electronic detection software such as ‘turnitin’. In addition, whether or not drafts have been so assessed, the University

224

College reserves the right to require an electronic version of the final document ( as submitted) for assessment.

SIGNED:……………………………………………………………………………………...

PRINT NAME:………………………………………………………………………………….

DATE:…………………………………………………………………………………………

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